“I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Darling don’t touch me, can’t you see the flames? Can’t you smell the smoke? Don’t you understand I burn everything that comes close? Do you see this ash scattered all around me?
“Poetry is the recognition of the disparate. The arrangement of words that should not otherwise belong together, yet once put side by side leads us to question how they could have ever been apart.”
—Lang Leav, ‘Poetry Is’, Self-Love for Small-Town Girls
“Tell me who you were, my love, before you were this. Tell me in your own words. You knew yourself once with the greatest conviction I had ever witnessed in anyone. You swore you would never change—not even for me. Tell me what distortions had warped your sense of self when you wandered through the house of mirrors that is your bright and brilliant mind. What refractions of light did you absorb as part of your reasoning that you are any less than you were. Who had come between us. What falsehood had separated you from yourself. How did you get so far that I can no longer reach you.”
—Lang Leav, ‘In Your Own Words’, Self-Love for Small-Town Girls
I heard a tiktok audio yesterday which said, “In Islam, we don’t do ‘til death do us part, it’s fi duniya wal akhira (in this world and the next)”. I thought that was such a beautiful concept… a love that transcends the earth, that transcends time… a love that is truly forever. A sacred love. But does love like that even exist anymore?
This notion of forever, of there being something beyond this life, is also beautifully soothing in that it helps us process and manage grief… death specifically. Maybe it comes from an increased sense of mortality as a result of chronic illness, but the death of loved ones has always been one of my greatest fears. It suffocates me. But the idea that this isn’t the end is always consoling.