aisle nine

these things are always broken into halves. they’re never whole or sated or completely there. it’s always half-empty and craving. there are parts of this that i’ve kept because maybe i was too selfish to let them belong to the backseat of your friend’s car or at the foot of your bed or in some abandoned moment you’d forget about later when the feelings were slender with all of their petals picked. the kinds of things i wish i could have just left with you because maybe then that would mean they weren’t that important to me. and when i tip toed across your hardwood floors i stood in the cracked door way for a second just fucking marveling at the way the whole place smelled like you. i know this is dangerous. i feel it too. i know that it’s volatile and uncompromising. and i know about pressing up against the rules just enough to crack them without letting them break. i know about letting the boundaries bend when they should have had you folded already. i know that sometimes you want pieces of people even though it’s erratic and impulsive and the consequences are heavy and waiting. so we try our hardest to walk into other empty spaces where we can let ourselves love someone quietly and without this shell shocked quality and we’re careful not to touch in splintering places where we’re swallowed in all the soft yellow noise. because sometimes you accidentally want people that just aren’t right for you. but sometimes you fill in the gaps with your own cracks and you say in soundless moments “okay. i’m in.”

--Ashli Wood

The bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.

“We’re too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are in case we’re nothing, and holding on so tight we lose everything else.”

--Clive Barker

“There’s power in numbers. It takes a village. Say it however you want, but the truth is that we cannot go through this life alone. Some of us are lucky enough to be born in the vicinity of our tribe; others will have to travel far and wide it, as I did. But I truly believe that whoever you are…there’s a place for you to fit in… The road to your dreams is sometimes dark, and it’s sometimes magical, but The Wizard of Oz had one thing right: it’s ultimately about the journey and the characters who accompany you on it, not about the destination.”

--Kelly Cutrone

"This is an important lesson to remember when you're having a bad day, a bad month, or a shitty year. Things will change: you won't feel this way forever. And anyway, sometimes the hardest lessons to learn are the ones your soul needs most. I believe you can't feel real joy unless you've felt heartache. You can't have a sense of victory unless you know what it means to fail. You can't know what it's like to feel holy until you know what it's like to feel really fucking evil. And you can't be birthed again until you've died."

--Kelly Cutrone, 'If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You'

"After all, you can't truly be happy if you've never known pain. You can't truly feel joy if you've never felt heartbreak. You can't know what it's like to be filled unless you've been empty."

--Kelly Cutrone, 'If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You'

“Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.”

--Gail Sheehy

Once again, she asked me what I meant. And again, my heart was in my words, but the explanation made no sense. Typical me.

“Where’s my heart at? Aw. Um, in my chest. I think it’s in there—on the right hand side. Sometimes it’s in my mouth and sometimes I can feel it in my stomach, when I get really nervous. So it’s pretty physical.”

--Florence Welch, when asked where her heart is at

What people don't understand about being a genius

Is that it is hard

It creeps inside of you and you can't relate

The world is the thing you cannot master

You really can't

You try to work for people

You let the people down

--Dorothea Lasky, 'Own Life'

"It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone."

--Clive Barker, 'Books of Blood 2'

"That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she'd never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet."

--Janet Fitch, 'Paint It Black'

"Here, here is my dark world. You carry it for a change. I'm out."

--Janet Fitch

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you’re depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"

--Margaret Atwood

"She was extending a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence."

--Jonathan Safran Foer

"I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water."

--D. H. Lawrence

“I have no advice for anybody; except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time, and how that is beautiful, and has poetry inside. Even places you hate.”

--Jeff Buckley

"Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are."

--Grant Morrison, 'The Invisibles'

"Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I’d like my whole life to be one single crazy idea."

--Milan Kundera, 'Farewell Waltz'

there are no legible signs

everything out of context starts to get so strange. drinking the kind of coffee that i used to hate, finding the little pile of change you pulled from out my pockets before you did the laundry, noticing the smell of smoke on my fingers and it smells safe, it smells like a sort of home i’ve always known. october came quick and it feels so familiar and so different. sometimes these things just sort of sneak up on you. when you realize you’re not seventeen anymore. when you walk into a room full of people and for once you’re not questioning whether they notice you - whether they should notice you, whether they notice you noticing them, and the endless list of who am i and who are they and more importantly who am i to them. when you’re doing things that scare you because maybe these are the things that help make you. when you still love a boy that’s not a stranger anymore, when he still loves you even though he’s seen you without your hair brushed or a shirt on or in his jeans the next morning when you go to grab the paper or right after you cried because things got hard and you weren’t ready. these things just sneak up on you. when you realize that all this time you were so used to life building it’s self around you and suddenly one day it occurs to you that maybe you’ve been building your own all along.

--Ashli Wood

The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm.

All quotes by author Michelle Tea

"Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other’s hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn’t feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet."

--'Rose of No Man’s Land'

"You try to be good, to be good and loving and nice and not hard, not tough, a sweet nice girl, not ugly, not full of ugliness, but people make it impossible."

"You are right where you should be

now act like it"

--'The Beautiful: Collected Poems'

"This is growing up, having to stomp out love, this is how people turn terrible."

"How do you make a girl know she's beautiful? What is the system for that, what do you show her, how do you give her a new set of eyes and turn her face back to the mirror?"

"it just breaks

a man's heart, watching

a girl so involved with her life,

without him like that."

"We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being alone in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring."

there's got to be something better than in the middle

i write these lullabies for sleepy towns, about how the people in them are careful secrets buried with their half-naked feelings, their unspoken word poetry. i smoke cigarettes when no one else is around, blowing smoke in the direction of some stranger’s ghosts, remembering the time i walked across the golden gate bridge and how cold san francisco was in july. that was the summer when i lost the flecks of light that used to hide in the dark parts of your careful eyes. last fall i still felt the smirk of potential hanging around here. but then you left and sometimes i think about driving by the place where we used to climb through windows and dream under those soft mississippi sounds. there’s something dangerous about a person who reminds you of yourself. but there’s also something dangerous about never doing the stupid things. never believing in shooting stars and wish bones and mood rings, in regretting the thought that maybe you could be anything you’d let yourself be. have we always been this broke without ever knowing it? have i always been this punch drunk and left-turned when a pink knuckled sunrise has me hoping all the planets just aligned, has me thinking we could cast our shadow puppets where the past forgot where it belonged. we crushed the night’s bones between our palms touching saying “fuck it,” and my dress hung wet and cold above the shore with my ankles shaking right next to yours when you told me “i think that if you touched me right now you could feel my nightmares.” everything used to always be a helpless secret away from smacking together right in front of our young and proud faces. and i’ve got a lot of secrets, these half naked feelings i kept even when the moment left and you were already getting with new people while i lingered on for just a little bit longer. i have a lot of dark places none of you will ever know about. i’m crowded and overshadowed with ghosts, with these burning words kaleidescoped on to quiet parts of me. and i’m afraid of a lot of things, i carelessly burn through moments when i could have felt something, moments where maybe in the middle we could have felt the same thing. but i’ve got a lot of loose teeth for memories and i’m always pulling at them just to remember they can still bleed. and i’m always squinting at the dust inbetween the stars thinking “that’s what i’m made of, what am i so afraid of.” i’m afraid of miscalls and mistakes that won’t make me into the person i want to be but will keep me between the same set of goddamn parenthesis i’ve been trapped between since i turned seventeen. i’m afraid of the dark parts of me none of you have ever seen. i’m afraid of a lot of things. and i just need to know that i’m not just some careful secrets, i’m not just unspoken word poetry. i need to know that i am my potential, i am my own ellipses, and i can still become whatever i am willing to be.

--Ashli Wood

blue mornings, and keeping you in mind.

I am a blue morning ripe and tired. The universe caught itself in the tangles of my hair and I know not how to get it out, so we struggle with one another. I am a cigarette, half-smoked, discarded early on—before I could blacken a lung or mutate a cell. In my dreams I am stretch armstrong with arms so long I can reach you. Oh, the Rockies are blocking my ears with built up clouds, but I can still feel you pulling there at the center of my chest. Coffeehouse crybaby, backyard saint, midnight warrior, barely joyous broken thing. We share the same troubled hopes, the same winking sky. Once, I wrote a poem on my tongue so you couldn’t see it, because I wanted you to taste it. Foolish me, I suppose I should have known that your lips would never meet mine. I’ve made so many promises that I’ll come find you—get to you—that I worry I might spend the rest of my life in transit. Not an obligation, but a voluntary movement. I am a heart. I am a cloudy head for thinking. Brick wall, waterfall, backlot demon calling my name. You said you hated the way that everything always feels so melancholy and I shot a silent prayer to my darkened ceiling that you would find your smile.

I was never taught to keep things at arms length, so when I see a spark, a flame, a flash, a silent moon glowing in the midnight sky, I am always trying to wrap my arms around it or swallow it whole. I’m either falling in love with strangers and daydreaming about running away or crying my pillowcases black and giving up. I would throw out my back if it meant carrying your troubles—eternal optimist with her feet dipped in something resembling the realistic. I want the best for everyone I’ve ever met and cry over broken hearts that aren’t my own. She told me that it was just an excuse to forget about my own problems, and hell, you know, she was probably right but I don’t think I can stop wanting to try and make you smile. I was taught to love with everything I’ve got, to bear the troubles of the people whose names I hold in my heart. I do not know any better—I only know that you are worth my creaking knees and aching back. It’s a preoccupation or perhaps a long-standing romance with the entire Universe. Always falling for underdogs and stars right on the brink of burning out because there’s something attractive in their glow. There’s just something so attractive in their glow. I wrote this keeping you in mind, I hope you know.

--jenna2step

Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping.

“When small drops began to fall and darken the world in penny-shaped circles, no one around him scurried for cover. For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.”

--Simon Van Booy, 'The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories'

"Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land."

--Simon Van Booy

"When obliged to exert myself, I am ignorant what to do! when forced to speak, I am at a loss for words; and if any one looks at me, I am instantly out of countenance. If animated with my subject, I express my thoughts with ease, but, in ordinary conversations, I can say nothing- absolutely nothing; and, being obliged to speak, renders them insupportable."

--The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Book 1.

"What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, this life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust! Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, never have I heard anything more divine?"

--Friedrich Nietzsche

“She’s never where she is,” I said. “She’s only inside her head.”

--'White Oleander'

“Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”

--Emerson

“Why do I torture myself by keeping it all a big secret?”

--Helga G. Pataki

“You grow up readin’ about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus’ when you think the world’s all full of amazin’ things, they tell you it’s really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin’ about for millions of years.”

--Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, 'Good Omens'

Once a year, she remembers that she is insignificant. Then she forgets again, because more than she is insignificant, she is forgetful.

"Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person - of any person whatsoever - instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.”

--Bernardo Soares, 'The Book of Disquiet' - Entry 49

“I hate listening to people’s dreams. It’s like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I’m not in any of them, and nobody’s having sex, I just… don’t care.”

--'It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia'

“To understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.”

--Salman Rushdie

"I don't think I'm tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake up and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else. I don't know who I am most of the time. It doesn't even matter to me."

--Bob Dylan