Christopher Sherman

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk (translated by C. J. Hogarth)

https://open.substack.com/pub/alovelettertoyou/p/anyway-its-about-old-friends?r=1efwxm&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

What We Want

by Linda Pastan

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don’t remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there even in full sun. 

Nothing doing, Giorgos Galanopoulos

“A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build. That’s what you mourn for when you’re losing someone you love. This language you’re not going to speak with anybody else.”

— Céline Sciamma

Habits

by Nikki Giovanni

i haven’t written a poem in so long i may have forgotten how unless writing a poem is like riding a bike or swimming upstream or loving you it may be a habit that once acquired is never lost but you say i’m foolish of course you love me but being loved of course is not the same as being loved because or being loved despite or being loved

if you love me why do i feel so lonely and why do i always wake up alone and why am i practicing not having you to love i never loved you that way

ill keep writing about surviving because i don't know what else there is

Nags Head, Joel Sternfeld

There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing, Chuck Patch

— The Death of the Hired Man, Robert Frost

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Love Letter, Hate Letter.” Red Suitcase

screenshots that make me cry

Teaching the Dog Not to Nip, Jim Moore (2005)

[text ID: Do you think it's easy, not biting the one you love? Try loving someone so much your mouth is only at home in the place where your teeth meet the flesh of your beloved. Try not tasting the flesh, not taking in your mouth the beloved, not going all the way.]