PAID PARKING

one woman's account of failure






The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth. - Georges Bataille 

(Source: freyjageist, via saturnrising)

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residue.

i give myself five days to forget you.

on the first day i rust.

on the second i wilt.

on the third day i sit with friends but i think about your tongue.

i clean my room on the fourth day. i clean my body on the fourth day.

i try to replace your scent on the fourth day. 

the fifth day, i adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate.

a wedding singer dressed in borrowed gold.

the midas of cheap metal.

tinsel in the middle of summer.

crevice glitter, two days after the party.

i glow the way unwanted things do,

a neon sign that reads;

come, i still taste like someones else’s mouth.

Warsan Shire

(Source: warsanshire, via leprintemps)

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(Source: currentinspiration, via dialogues)

“And don’t ever show weakness.
Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing. I’m like an ambulance
on two legs, hauling the patient
inside me to Last Aid
with the wailing cry of a siren,
and people think it’s ordinary speech.”

- Yehuda Amichai, from “You Musn’t Show Weakness”

(Source: airwalker)

“fifteen ways to stay alive”, Daphne Gottlieb

  1. Offer the wolves your arm only from the elbow down. Leave tourniquet space. Do not offer them your calves. Do not offer them your side. Do not let them near your femoral artery, your jugular. Give them only your arm.

  2. Wear chapstick when kissing the bomb.

  3. Pretend you don’t know English.

  4. Pretend you never met her.

  5. Offer the bomb to the wolves. Offer the wolves to the zombies.

  6. Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection.

  7. Don’t inhale. 

  8. Realize that this love was not your trainwreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your Waterloo, did not cause massive hemorrhaging from a rusty knife. That love is still to come.

  9. Use a rusty knife to cut through most of the noose in a strategic place so that it breaks when your weight is on it.

  10. Practice desperate pleas for attention, louder calls for help. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: May Day, Aidez-Moi, Ayúdeme.

  11. Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t kiss knives. Don’t kiss. 

  12. Pretend you made up the zombies, and only superheroes exist. 

  13. Pretend there is no kryptonite.

  14. Pretend there was no love so sweet that you would have died for it, pretend that it does not belong to someone else now, pretend like your heart depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck — you watched the train go by and felt the air brush your face and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can fly. You are a superhero. And there is no kryptonite.

  15. Forget her name.

(Source: leprintemps)

Love does not
make me gentle or kind - Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

(Source: yesyes, via tweedarms)

I ask him if it’s usual to be sad, as we are. He says it’s because we’ve made love in the daytime, with the heat at its height. He says it’s always terrible after. He smiles. Says, Whether people love each other or not, it’s always terrible. Says it will pass as soon as it gets dark. I say he’s wrong, it’s not just because it was daytime, I feel a sadness I expected and which comes only from myself. I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in photos of myself from when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me. - Marguerite Duras, from The Lover

(Source: porcupine-concubine, via saturnrising)

But you were young, and you had Plenty of time: Going west,

You slept on the train and did not smile. Under you the plains widened, turned silver.

You slept with your mouth open.

You were nothing, You were snow falling through the ribs Of the dead.

You were all I had.

— L. Levis

(Source: valuska, via flowerfield)

in my mind, she has all my good qualities and none of my bad qualities. and she’s a few things i wish i was. 

Grief can destroy you or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to end in death, and you are alone. Or you can realize that every moment of it had more meaning than you dared to recognize at the time, so much meaning it scared you, so you just lived, just took for granted the love and laughter of each day, and didn’t allow yourself to consider the sacredness of it. But when it’s over and you’re alone, you begin to see that it wasn’t just a movie and a dinner together, not just watching sunsets together, not just scrubbing a floor or washing dishes together or worrying over a high electric bill. It was everything, it was the why of life, every event and precious moment of it. The answer to the mystery of existence is the love you shared sometimes so imperfectly, and when the loss wakes you to the deeper beauty of it, to the sanctity of it, you can’t get off your knees for a long time, you’re driven to your knees not by the weight of the loss but by gratitude for what preceded the loss. And the ache is always there, but one day not the emptiness, because to nurture the emptiness, to take solace in it, is to disrespect the gift of life. - - Dean Koontz
Odd Hours