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.
Spritzen
Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands.
Curtsied when you have, and kissed
The wild waves whist.
Foot it featly here and there,
And, sweet sprites, bear
The burden. Hark, hark!
Ariel, The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Kira-Kira
I watched a swatch of the sky turn red.
The red spread like blood in the sea: red, red, red, and then less and less red, until there was only blue left.
I squinted as the sun rose.
― Kira-Kira
New Crops
Vines will be planted, corn will spring up, a whole growth of new crops; and people will still fall in love in vintages and harvests yet to come. Life is eternal; it is a perpetual renewal of birth and growth.
Emile Zola
Neuvième
“Perhaps I have loved the artist because creation is the nearest we come to divinity.”
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I (1931-1934)
Children and Birds
One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Pie Girl
“I hope someday somebody wants to hold you for 20 minutes straight and that’s all they do.
They don’t pull away. They don’t look at your face. They don’t try to kiss you.
All they do is wrap you up in their arms and hold on tight, without an ounce of selfishness to it.”
—Jenna Hunterson, Waitress
Next to Love
Cold Solstice
At cold solstice I cut
the night, take its long waist
to my quilted bed,
curl up the dark under
broideries of spring, to wait
a night spread out again for you.
—Hwang Jini, At Cold Solstice
