Dixième
Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.
Dr. William Osler
ten years come and gone / I soon run short of fingers / a decade, complete
Happy tenth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche, this little sliver of my soul.
We have reached double digits together, readers, and I humbly thank you.
Upside Down
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you.
And do not worry that your life is turning upside down.
How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
—Rumi
The Kiss
Love is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and squalls of flour:
love is a clash of lightning bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.
—Neruda, Love Sonnet XII
My Beating Heart
“Ha! hold my Brain; be still my beating Heart.”
—William Mountfort, Zelmane: Or, The Corinthian Queen: A Tragedy
Happy Valentine’s Day! You make my tart beet.
Redrum
Fireside Holidays
It is one of those nights when you can feel the life in your house to be as warm as it looks from outside.
—Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy
Single Seed
تل دھرنے کو جگہ نہ ہونا / Tall Dharnay Ko Jagah Nah Hona / a place so crowded that no room remains even for a single seed of sesame
— Urdu phrase
Boo
Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever.
—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Not A Sprint
Like wine through clay,
joy in his blood bursting his heart—the bliss!
Robert Browning, Pheidippides
It is my 26th birthday, today.
More pressing is that my exam, culmination of the last 3 months of my life, is next Friday.
I am therefore resolutely trying to ignore the fact that my birthday has arrived until then.
It has been a marathon, sans doute.