#frank o’hara the man that you were
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Librarian Miguel x Flower Shop Owner
tags: tooth rotting amounts of fluff and some suggestive bits. No one is spider man in this AU, mainly just character set up stuff :3 and no gender is specified for reader any1 can read it
hopefully this will be me getting back into writing since i took a break from it lol (this was done in 30-40 minutes at 2am so sorry if it isnt too high quality)
˚ʚ♡ɞ˚
In the little rural town of Nueva, there was a library, it was owned and operated by the single hottest man in town, and probably the whole state, Miguel O’Hara.
Miguel O’Hara was a simple man really, he ironed his clothes, did sudoku on the train and ate a bagel with light cream cheese, an assortment of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries every morning every day for breakfast.
He took his coffee dark with the littlest splash of cream and one sugar cube. Two sugar cubes would be just reckless. Coffee could be substituted with Camellia flower tea when he was out of coffee, peppermint for when he had a migraine.
All the women in town would sing his praises to another. Little was known about him besides that after the death of his daughter he moved to Nueva and opened his library. In front of his library was a small community garden and a bench dedicated to his dear daughter by the double doors.
No one brought it up, no one asked, and he liked it that way. He liked the simplicity of Nueva. The air was cleaner, the people there warmer and the ringing in his ears seemingly disappeared when he moved there.
He liked to keep his library neat and tidy, he had plenty of rules set in place to follow…children's books in the front and adult books in the back. The spicer content was shelved by the cook books so no kids found them. You are to only use the various lamps in the library, never the big light. It totally ruined the cozy atmosphere he had set up.
Jazz, Frank Sinatra, and Selena Quintanilla was the only music allowed to be played, he didn’t like any other types of music. Coffee was free as long as you returned your mug to the table his coffee maker was on once you were done. No talking louder than a whisper, and only pet the library cat if you had all your shots. That was mostly a joke, but Miguel didn’t want people who weren’t up to date on their immunizations touching his cat.
It was almost closing time, and there were only a few people left. The familiar cast of characters Miguel had come to know now wandering the maze of shelves. Ben Riley was using one of the community monitors. Sending emails back and forth to his girlfriend in Canada. Only god knew if she was real or not.
When Miguel asked why Ben just bought his own laptop or computer to converse with his girlfriend, Ben explained he didn’t want to go through the trouble of setting up a laptop when he could just walk to the library to use one for free.
Miguel couldn’t help but hold back the fattest eye roll known to man when he heard that.
Peter Parker was looking for cookbooks for the dinner he was gonna make to win his ex wife back. Stressing over the perfect dish to make as young Mayday Parker debated whether she wanted to check out GoodNight Moon or Skippyjon Jones for her bedtime story tonight.
Then there was Pavitr Prabhakar and Gayatri Singh. Debatably his most adorable regulars. Miguel would watch the two teenagers stumble through their awkward study dates, he couldn't help but feel the littlest bit proud of Pav when he finally worked up the courage and kissed her.
But his favorite, hands down, was you. You owned the little flower shop across the street from his library next to the bakery. On the opening, you had brought him a bunch of sunflowers tied with a pearl white ribbon as a gift. He didn't have the heart to tell her that he was actually allergic to sunflowers and graciously took the generous gift with a stuffy nose and kind smile.
You would come waltzing in, batting your eyelashes like you were auditioning for a mascara commercial. At first he had no interest in romance, but you were just so…kind, caring, loving, compassionate. You were so slow and soft spoken, giving him the space he needed while he grieved and was there afterwards to hug him and dry his tears.
At the beginning, you’d only stop by and help him in the library or check out a novel or two, but as you became a frequent visitor, you stopped coming just to help him…and started coming just to see him.
He remembered how one day, you had arrived at the library as usual. A perplexed look on your darling face with your hands behind your back. You had spent all of the night before carefully crafting a special bouquet of lilies and tulips. Making sure there wasn't anything in it he was allergic to.
After dancing around the subject, you had slowly confessed her feelings to him.
The next hour was spent in the back room of the library. Feverishly groping another and kissing frantically, your glasses kept sliding against each other’s as you both ran to rip each other's clothes off another's bodies.
Miguel was still that simple man he was all those years ago when he moved to the sleepy town of Nueva. The idea of building a real relationship with someone scared him from how many times he'd been hurt in the past and the fresh wounds from the death of his child.
But now he has you. He has someone to come home to besides the empty walls of his little cottage home. He has a significant other to fill that void and to lift him up, someone to be his lock screen picture.
Someone to tell all the things he’s learned from the regulars at the library. He told you about Ben getting catfished, Peter winning MJ over with homemade ratatouille and a promise, about Pav and Gayatri’s kiss while the both of you snuggled up on the couch over a bottle of strawberry wine.
You'd both started the relationship a little rocky, not knowing whether this was right with the things Miguel was working through then. But it soon proved to be the best decision either of you could have made.
He had your wedding picture next to Gabriela's school picture day portrait on his desk.
His favorite parts of his day were when you’d walk from your shop to the library on your lunch break to eat together, and in the evenings when he'd read the book you were currently reading out loud to you in the evenings, before going to sleep together.
He was still that simple man, but now he’d share his bagels with you. He’d offer to iron your clothes for you, and even when you didn’t understand, he showed you how to play sudoku on the long train rides. Even though you were just nodding along to hear him talk about something he enjoyed.
#miguel o'hara#atsv miguel#2099<3#spiderman 2099#writing#across the spiderverse#fluff#miguel ohara fluff#just cutesy reader being cutesy w their man#tooth rotting fluff
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Meditations in an Emergency
by Frank O’Hara
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
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Together At Last (Kellex x Reader)
After your girlfriend cheats on you at a wedding, you find yourself at the wedding’s free bar, unaware that the two women who’d change your life forever were in the crowd, two women you’d been waiting for, for as long as you can remember, two women who’d been waiting for you for just as long.
In all honesty, you hadn’t even wanted to go to the wedding, it’s not that you didn’t like Christen Press or Tobin Heath, it was just the fact that your girlfriend had already been distant, the two of you fighting non-stop, the last thing you wanted to do was spend the entirety of the night together to be frank.
The pheromones wafting in the air made your head spin, a dull ache settling in the back of your skull, that ache rivaled only by the ache in your chest.
You swirled the contents of your glass, the ice inside clinking against the thick glass of the tumbler, the sight of your girlfriend, well former girlfriend, repplaying in your mind, the woman gripping his tuxedo as the two of them kissed passionately.
You growl, your grip on the glass tightening as you remembered the way she giggled when he buried his face in her neck.
You knew your distressed pheromones were wafting in the air, considering several omegas were glancing your way, batting their eyelashes, as they licked their lips, their irises visibly darkening.
Your vision is obstructed moments later by who you can tell is an alpha, the man’s scent nothing compared to your own.
“Hey man, can I get--
He falls silent as his eyes catch yours, his throat bobbing.
“Uhhh, never mind.”
The bartender snorts as the man rushes away, putting as much distance as he can between yourself and him.
“You know this is an open bar, right?” He asks with smirk, the man unaffected by your scent considering he was a beta.
You shrug,
“If anyone has the balls, they’re welcome to come get a drink.” You say swirling the contents of your glass, intent on drinking the entire bar dry, who wouldn’t when they were just cheated on by the woman they thought they’d spend forever with?
***
Within the crowd meanwhile, both Alex Morgan and Kelley O’Hara giggle as Alex gives the defender a spin, before pulling her against her chest, their lips meeting in a chaste kiss.
From the get-go, the pair knew they were true mates, their souls pulling the two of them together the second their eyes met.
Though things had been overwhelming, they’d stayed true to one another, all the while searching intently for the alpha who would slot everything into place.
“I love you.” Alex whispers against the defender’s lips, the woman smiling.
“I love you too.”
Kelley licks her lips, wiggling her brows suggestively.
“What do you say we--
Kelley’s words trail off, a smell that had been wafting in the air now making its way towards the two of them, the pair going stiff, noses twitching.
A number of alphas and omegas react to the scent; however, they weren't reacting to the level they were, their legs trembling, their hearts racing, the scent calling out to them, the smoky scent, seductive.
“Do you smell it too...?” Alex whispers, she and Kelley sharing a glance, the shorter of the two nodding.
The scent sends them in opposite directions, both in search of the tantalizing scent tickling their noses.
As if someone had left a trail of breadcrumbs for her, Kelley is lead to the bar, the woman’s brown orbs settling on the back of the only woman at it, the woman nursing a tumbler of amber colored liquid.
Kelley licks her lips, the woman drawn forward by the intoxicating scent emanating off of you.
The instant she takes a seat your eyes are on her, eyes that widen immensely when your Y/E/C’s meet brown.
Your breath hitches, your mouth opening and closing repeatedly as you stare at the woman, a woman who chooses to remain silent, instead simply staring back.
You open your mouth, a chuckle passing through your open lips as you shake your head.
“Hey.” You smile, the scent of alcohol on your breath, your eyes bleary.
“Hey.”
Despite the hazy effects of the alcohol, you reach towards her, your hand meeting her cheek tenderly.
She turns her head, her chest rumbling as she nuzzles into your palm, her brown orbs disappearing behind closed eyelids.
It’s then that SHE makes her presence known, the woman’s hand resting gently on your shoulder, your hand never leaving the omega’s face as you turn towards the source of the gentle touch.
Your eyes double in size when Y/E/C’s meet darkened blues, their owner's breath hitching when your eyes meet.
“It’s you.” She whispers, the woman’s hand leaving your shoulder and instead landing on your back.
You lick your lips, you head on a swivel as you look between the two omegas.
Silently, you fish a 100$ bill out of your pocket before slapping it on the counter, and without a single glance, make your way away from the bar, the two omegas following close behind you.
“It’s a free bar!” The bartender calls out, but you remain silent, your focus entirely on the two omegas who were now on either side of you, the two women intertwining your fingers as you leave the venue.
***
The second you reach the hotel room you were sandwiched between them, the shorter of the two taking charge, her hands on your cheeks as her lips met yours, over and over again.
You groan, the feel of the tallest woman caressing the bulge in your pants making you snarl.
“You’re so gorgeous.” You whisper against her lips, twisting in her hold before your lips meet the taller of the two’s.
“SO gorgeous.” You growl, your hips canting when the shortest woman’s hand settles on the bulge in your pants.
The three of you collectively back towards the bed, heels, and shoes littering the floor, a trail of clothes leading to the bed until nearly all of you are bare.
Suddenly, you’re on your back, the two women standing over you as you push yourself up on your elbows, watching as the pair eye you hungrily.
And it’s with that, that they move forwards, the night of your life ahead of you.
***
The following morning you wake with a groan, the throbbing of your head rivaled only by the throbbing in your neck, your brows furrowing as your eyes flutter open, the smell of sex hanging in the air.
You blink rapidly, wincing as you sit up, your eyes growing comically wide when you realize you aren’t alone.
In fact, you’re in bed, with not one but two of THE most gorgeous looking women you’d ever seen.
It’s in that moment that you see it, the flesh of each woman’s neck graced by a fresh and flushed imprint of teeth.
You lick your lips, the taste of iron on your tongue, as you inhale the scent hovering in the air.
The scent was one of pure dominance, your scent intertwined with that of the two omegas currently fast asleep in your bed.
You take a deep breath, giving your cheeks a slap.
Though your memory was hazy, you remembered vividly how it felt when your eyes locked with theirs, it felt like utter completion.
Even at this very moment the two women were calling to you, and you felt the need to immediately respond.
Your eyes widen when one of the women begins to stir, her blue orbs fluttering open slowly, her hand on her head, which is no doubt throbbing nearly as bad as your own.
“Kel?” She winces, giving the woman beside her a shake, earning a growl in return that makes you smile softly.
Eventually, she stirs, her brown orbs fluttering open, immediately settling on the woman beside her.
“What happened--
She falls silent, her eyes widening when she realizes you’re standing at the end of the bed, she and Alex sharing a glance.
The blue-eyed woman inhales sharply, her fingertips brushing the fresh bite mark gracing the shorter woman’s chest.
“It’s...” She trails off, glancing down at her own chest, blue orbs zeroing in on the imprint of teeth on her neck.
Both turn to you at roughly the same time, the breath hitching when the see the two bite marks adorning your own neck.
“It’s you.” The blue orbed woman whispers, the opposite woman’s brown orbs boring into you.
You, however, don’t move, unable to process what it is that’s going on, the fact that you’d woken up with two strangers, a literal day after your girlfriend cheated on you rocked you to your core.
“I-I-I...” You stutter, unable to find your words, your mind racing, even though your head is throbbing.
The taller of the two stands, sheets wrapped around her body as she moves towards you, gently cupping your cheek, the touch sending a spark throughout your entire body.
It’s then that you make eye contact for the first time since the two had awaken, your eyes widening, your breath hitching, your inner beast howling.
The shorter of the two stands, pulling the shirt you'd worn at the wedding over her head before she too moves towards you, your eyes meeting brown, your breath again hitching, the beast within you again reacting to her presence.
“Who-Who are you?” You stammer, your eyes darting between the two women.
The taller of the two smiles, caressing your cheek.
“I’m Alex Morgan.” Your eyes double in size, the woman’s name jogging your memory, how could you forget Alex Morgan?
“Kelley O’Hara.”
You shake your head rapidly, realizing quickly who the two were, the haziness within your mind dissipating.
“Do we get to know your name?” Alex asks and you chuckle.
“Or are you going to keep that, big, mysterious alpha thing going on?” Kelley teases and you grin, your white teeth on full display.
“I’m Y/N.”
Alex and Kelley share a glance your eyes widening when the two near bare women wrap their arms tightly around you.
“We’ve been searching for you for so long...” Alex whispers, turning her head, nudging your scent gland with the tip of her nose.
Kelley inhales your scent deeply, she too nuzzling into your neck, her brown orbs disappearing behind closed eyelids.
Though you hadn’t known them long, your chest began to rumble in a purr, your eyes closing as you wrapped your arms around the two of them, pulling them close.
It’s in that very moment that someone knocks on the door.
“Come on guys, I know you’re in there, and I know you’re as hungover as me, let's go get some food. I’m starving.”
Your eyes narrow, your nostrils flaring, the thought of another alpha being near your mates making you growl.
Alex and Kelley watch, wide eyed as you jerk on a pair of pants and a shirt before stomping towards the door, whipping it open with a scowl.
Beyond the door, Emily Sonnett’s eyes widen, her mouth agape as she stares blankly at you.
“I-I-I'm sorry, I must have the wr-wrong...” She falls silent, looking over your shoulder, catching sight of both Alex and Kelley, the two incredibly underdressed.
You snarl, taking a step closer.
“They’re busy.” You bite, the blonde swallowing hard as she again glances over your shoulder.
Alex and Kelley meanwhile, share a glance, the hairs on their arms standing up as they watch you glare Emily down, your dominant scent filling the room, their omegas preening at the smell.
“I-I’ll just uh, go.” Emily says before turning on her heels and sprinting off.
You poke your head out of the door, smirking when the blonde races down the hall and moves out of sight.
You kick the door shut behind you, your alpha elated at the fact that you had yet again scared another alpha away.
You lean your forehead against the door, your breath caught in your throat, if it wasn’t obvious before, it was now, the two omegas currently standing behind you were indeed your mates.
A beat passes before a hand settles on your back, followed soon by another, the two women rubbing your back soothingly.
“We know it’s a lot right now.” Alex whispers, her nails scraping at the nape of your neck, causing your chest to rumble in a purr.
“But we’ll get through it together.” Kelley says, pressing a tender kiss to your shoulder, the feel of her lips against your skin making you shudder.
You take a deep breath, nodding to yourself before you turn on your heels, smiling softly when you see the worried looks gracing both of their faces.
“So, you’re my mates, huh??” You ask, the two unable to bite back their grins.
“Yeah.” Kelley smiles, her brown orbs meeting Alex’s blue.
“It looks that way.”
Alex and Kelley share a glance, the two closing the distance between you, their arms wrapping around your middle as they bury their faces in your neck, nuzzling against the scent glands on either side.
“Whatever happens...” Alex starts, pressing tender kisses to your neck as she whispers. “We’ll do it together.”
Kelley kisses your jawline, your chest rumbling as the two omegas, your mates, lavish you with affection.
“Together?” You ask, butterflies forming in your chest at the prospect of a future with the two women.
They pull back, the pair sharing a glance before nodding.
“Together.”
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Silk & Cologne (6)
A Miguel O’Hara x OC series - link to AO3 (X)
Chapter 6 - Lecture
Pairing: Miguel O’Hara x Female OC
Words: 2.6K+ words
Warnings: PG - mentions of scares and implied injuries and some violence.
Summary: Lisa’s first day of training doesn’t quite go according to plan.
///////
“You mind letting me in? It’s a bit chilly out here,” Miguel muttered softly as he gave me a weird look after my stutter.
“Oh, uh, sure,” I chuckled nervously as I stood to the side, inviting him in.
“Gracias,” he responded plainly as he stepped inside. - Thank you
He was so tall he could literally reach up and touch the ceiling with his fingers. He towered over me as I closed the sliding door, shutting out the cool air before I shuffled passed him.
“Not to be frank, but I was expecting Gwen?” I raised a brow as I began to clean up my mess.
“Gwen was asked to assist Jessica for a mission, so I volunteered to pick you up in her place,” Miguel explained as he stepped further into the room, looking around. He glanced over, watching as I stuffed all the comic books in a bag and slammed it on the desk.
I huffed, catching my breath as I walked over to my dresser drawer and grabbed a change of clothes. “I’ll just change quickly and we’ll go,”
“Take your time,” Miguel nodded firmly, hands on his hips. He watched me step into the bathroom and lock the door before pressing a button on his watch. “Lyla, scan the area,”
“Yep, yep!” Lyla piped up as she materialized a few tiny drones for Miguel as they began to hover around the room.
“Wait, scanning? Is everything okay?” I called from the bathroom.
I began to strip down yesterday's clothes, tossing them aside.
“Just scanning and making sure nothing is out of the ordinary. I wouldn’t want another anomaly slipping through to your universe,” Miguel explained.
“Uh huh,” I was half paying attention to him as I was focused on getting my top off, and once my bare stomach and sports bra were in view as I looked at myself in the mirror, my hands couldn’t help but wander down to faint scaring along my stomach.
I just have zoned out for a second longer than I should have. I heard Miguel’s voice through the doorway. “Everything alright?”
“Oh, yes!” I quickly snapped back into reality as I rushed to finish getting ready. “Um, what’s an anomaly exactly? Something that’s from another universe?”
“Like the Spider that bit you and the guards, yes,” Miguel nodded as he walked closer towards the desk. One of the comics caught his eye as he gently pulled it out to get a closer look. Realizing it was a comic of him, his cheeks flushed faintly, scoffing at it before shoving it back in the bag. “Among other things,”
The bathroom door unlocked as I stepped back into my hotel room, wearing a black tank top with a red zip up sweater over top and black cargo pants. “Like what?”
Miguel seems to stare at me for a few solid seconds, as if debating to tell me more. “That’s. . .” He hesitated briefly before shaking it off. “Not important for right now.”
I got the feeling that it was a touchy subject for him so I didn’t want to press it any more than he wanted to talk about. He could be intentionally taking things slowly for me, not wanting me to feel overwhelmed about everything. In just over 24 hours I discovered the existence of other dimensions and in said dimensions, superheroes, Spider-Man especially, are actually real.
I’m feeling fantastic!
“Before I forget,” Miguel reached behind him and pulled something out from his pocket. “Your Gizmo is ready,”
My eyes lit up at the proclamation as I extended my hand out to take it. He handed it to me and when I pulled back and took a closer look at it, I twitched, my head tilted to the side as I stared at it.
“This looks like a SmartWatch?” I looked up at him.
“The Gizmo is designed uniquely for all their holders to represent their dimension and its likeness. So when Lyla and Margo did their research and constructed the watch, this was the result. Do you not like it?”
The Gizmo was designed to look exactly like a Sony SmartWatch. If it wasn’t for the Society touch screen interface, I would have mistaken it completely with an actual smart device from my dimension.
“No, I like it!” I reassured him with an eager nod as I slipped it on to my wrist before my voice lowered to a whisper, “Or cause Spider-Man is owned by Sony?”
“I’m sorry?” Miguel spoke up.
“Nothing!” I responded quickly, hands behind my back.
We just stared at each other with these dumbfounded expressions on our face before Miguel shook his head with a sigh. “You’re certainly an interesting one, Lisa,”
I raised a brow at the man as I grabbed my duffel bag and reached for my notebook. “Alright then,”
“What’s that?” He asked, pointing at it.
“This?” I paused, showing it off. “I just took some notes last night to help me prepare for my training,”
“Notes? Anything involving those?” Miguel raised a brow at me as he pointed back towards the pile of comic books on my desk.
I scrunched my neck between my shoulders as I hesitated to answer the question, “. . . Maybe?”
He gave me a look that said ‘I didn’t believe you’ before motioning his hand towards me, gesturing that I hand it over. Like a kid caught cheating on a test, I handed it to him and watched with bated breath as he rummaged through my notes. He seemed to idle more on certain pages than others.
The drones Lyla summoned chimed, a green light pulsing in their optics before they disappeared. “Scans are good! No anomalies in sight, boss,”
When he heard that, he slapped the book shut with one hand before tossing it back to me. “Alright, I’ve seen enough,”
I juggled the book in my hand before catching it as Miguel activated a portal behind us. Shoving the notebook in my bag, I slipped the shoulder strap of my bag on as Miguel motioned to follow me through the portal. I could tell by the look on his face that he felt training me was going to be hard.
///////
I knew the expression on his face wasn’t lying to me. If he thought training me was hard, training under him was even harder.
We didn’t even stop to say hi to Margo or Lyla upon stepping through the other side of the portal. Miguel told me to keep following him through the halls of the Society until we arrived at the training center.
For the last two hours, he had me undergo strict training regimens. Running laps, push ups, sit ups. I swear it felt like I was back in my fitness class at College. But the worst of it all, which was the one I appeared to be excelling in the most, was the rock climbing wall.
The reason Miguel wanted me to go through all of this was to help build up my body muscles and stamina, so once my powers completely kick in, I won’t feel like an absolute mess. Well, jokes on him, because my body feels like an absolute mess right now and on the verge of collapsing.
He walked me through the course with a harness first before roping me into climbing it again without one. It got me the feeling that he was using fear to try and trigger my powers.
“You’re slowing down,” Miguel commented with an annoyed look in his eyes.
“Am not,” I retaliated with a heavy sigh as I reached for another handle. “Just catching my breath is all,”
“When it comes to being Spider, villains won’t give you a chance to catch your breath,” Miguel lectured as he shook his head.
As I continued to steadily climb, I caught the noise of a web sling as suddenly a blob of web fluid stuck to the next handle I was reaching for. I yelped, my hand recoiling back as I started to lose my balance. My arm waved frantically before I reached out and grabbed a different handle and caught myself from falling.
I glared down at Miguel and I just barely saw a smug little look on his face. “You did not just do that,”
“Do what?” He raised a brow, winking at me as he didn’t bother trying to hide a spare web shooter he had on hand.
GOD, why does his face have to look so good while he looks at me like that?
I scoffed at him, rolling my eyes. “You are so smug,”
I carefully continued my climb and as I reached for another handle, another web blast covered it and I recoiled, only this time both of my hands drew back as I found myself falling. I screamed as I reached out and tried to grab onto a handle before my hands and feet slapped onto the wall and I found myself skidding to a halt.
I breathed in heavily as I realized my hands and feet stuck on to the wall. I peered closely at one of my hands to see tiny little spider pricks on my fingers. “Hey! I’m actually doing it!”
As soon as I reached over to try and climb on my own, the emotion of fear melted away. Along with the ability to stay stuck to the wall. Both my hands and feet slipped as I screamed and I fell straight down to the floor, my back slamming into the gym matt below the climbing wall.
“Ow,” I groaned.
“You’re not focused enough,” Miguel scoffed as he looked down at me, hands on his hips. “Being Spider-Man isn’t about memorizing or predicting your abilities,” He knelt down beside me, giving me a hard stare.
“What? Are they not accurate enough?” I teased tiredly.
He shook his head at me, eyes narrowed. “It’s not so much as what’s up there,” he flicked a finger at my forehead before tapping my chest over where my heart is. “It’s about what you feel in there,”
He stood back up, offering me his hand.
“Again,” He commanded.
I breathed deeply before I reached out and gripped his strong hand as he hoisted me up from the floor with such ease, I almost got dizzy as I regained my footing.
Hands on my knees, I looked up at him. “Can’t I just take a break for 5 minutes? At least so I can get some water?”
“We’ll take a break when I say we’re taking a break,” He stated firmly as he turned his back to me. “Only when I’m satisfied that you’ve made actual progress, Lisa,”
I could feel the frustration boiling inside of me as my fingers curled into fists as I fixed my posture, walking past him towards the wall. “Smartass,” I muttered.
He whipped his head towards me, a dark look in his eyes. “What was that?”
I stopped moving, standing still as I gave him a side glance. He was really starting to annoy me with his attitude and behavior this morning. “Did you not hear me?”
I felt something snap in my wrist as I whirled around and fired a web sling at Miguel. The web fluid hit his shoulder as he took a step back, gripping it tightly as he pulled it off. I froze, realizing what I had just done.
He locked his gaze towards me. This wasn’t the same power I accidentally unleashed on his face yesterday. This was stronger.
“Again,” He ordered.
With a strong, heavy breath, I latched my hand out, firing a web sling from my wrist. This one felt stronger, more powerful as it launched and stuck right to Miguel’s chest. A proud smile formed on my face until he suddenly grabbed the string and yanked on it, pulling me forward.
I stumbled, my feet tripping on one another. Before I could fall to the floor, Miguel rushed forward and caught me by using his hand to grasp my chin and the top half of my neck. He stared at me for a good long second, his warm breath fanning my skin.
“You hesitated. Spider-Man never hesitates,”
He growled under his breath, staring at me as his brown iris flashes red every so briefly, leaving a mark into my soul before releasing me. I reached out and caught myself from completely collapsing. My body felt incredibly warm, sweating even.
“Fine. 5 minutes then,” he sighed, shaking his head as his hands found their place on his hips.
I glanced up towards Miguel, a wave of guilt washing over me. Sure, I probably shouldn’t have reacted like that. But he was still being a jerk. A huge one.
As I caught my breath, a new set of footsteps caught my ear. As we were training, no other Spider came near us, specifically Miguel. Everyone just let us be as we went through our training. So this newcomer might have had a death wish if he was brave enough to approach us, especially now that I had pissed Miguel off.
A deeper masculine voice whistled a tone from his lips as he stalked towards us. I glanced over to see a Spider character who’s figure appeared black and white wearing street clothes from a punk rock band, a guitar at his back.
“No more pencils, no more books
No more teachers, dirty looks~”
The longer I stared at him, the sooner it hit me in my mind about who he was. Spider-Punk.
“Hobie, not now,” Miguel spoke with a tense tone.
“Easy, boss man, just checking in on the new girl,” Hobie raised his hands in a defensive manner. “You’re not giving her a hard time are you? Wait a minute, of course you are,”
I stood up slowly from the mat as I took in Hobie’s appearance. He had such a swagger to him that made me act older, but I could feel by his expressions and the look in his eyes that he was a teenager, or closer to a young adult. Maybe 17?
“He’s just a little . . strict with his teachings, that’s all,” I spoke softly.
I could tell Miguel was glancing over at me. I didn’t see his gaze this time.
“He is right about one thing though, I’ll give credit where credit is due,” Hobie smirked. “Being Spider-Man is about what’s in your heart. We all are different and unique. I get the feeling this hard core muscle training might not be for you, Lisa,”
“You know my name?” I asked him, surprised.
“Who doesn’t? You’re the chick from Earth-1218,” Hobie laughed as he playfully stalked around me, “Everyone has been talking about you. I’m surprised you’re gussying up to this big fella of all people,”
I could feel the words sting as he spoke. This one was a troublemaker, but he was honest.
Miguel stepped forward, “What, you saying I can’t teach her?” He glared at Hobie.
“Miguel–!” I looked between the pair, reaching out.
“All I’m saying is this might not be the way to go training her,” Hobie responded. “Look at her, she’s gonna pass out at any minute now cause you won’t cut her some slack,”
“Hobie, it’s okay, really, it’s just–” I looked over towards Hobie.
“He gave you the whole fate of the multiverse lecture too, didn’t he?” Spider-Punk gave me a knowing smile.
Yes. Yes he did.
“Well then,” Miguel sighed as he rose a hand to his forehead, pinching the skin there as he muttered something in Spanish that I couldn’t decipher before glancing over at us. “If you think you’d do such a good job, you can train her today,”
I watched with a shocked look on my face as Miguel turned his back to us, stomping away. I called out to him, but Miguel didn’t even so much as offer me a side glance as he exited the training room, all eyes trained on him. When he was gone, the rest of the Spider’s resumed their training.
“Now that Mr. Big Shot is getting some air, come on,” Hobie motioned for me to follow him. “Food’s on me,”
///////
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A Curse is Cast
A Gojo Satoru x (f!) reader
companion piece to Hope in an Office Crush
Word Count: 3.0k
Pairing: Gojo x reader
Rating: GSA (angsty and sad undertones, but no one truly dies); kind of hopeful ending
Warnings: someone falls into a coma & eventually wakes up; the nanami & reader from HiaOC hatch a plan to have their friends fall “in like” with the other…
Pinterest Link for image below
Pls tag me if you know the og artist! Thanks!
Poem: Have a Coke with You, Frank O’Hara
You were getting ready for another early dinner date with your newly about a month old boyfriend from accounting. You’re currently on the phone with your best friend who is freaking out on her end because you had decided to set your friend up with someone who was close to your own boyfriend once upon a time. You tell your best friend that there is nothing to worry about and through a coffee run earlier this week, you sat her down with your new beau and for whatever reason, your friend was skeptical about the existence of this fabled ‘pretty eyed playboy.’
You’re putting the finishing touch on a simple glam look as you hear her exclaim:
“You set me up?!”
“You were being skeptical about him and when Nanami talked to his friend last time, he mentioned a blind date would be best…I gotta go. Good luck Friday night though!”
You hang up as you smile when a familiar chime goes off from your phone:
Meet me in the lobby, starshine.--Nanami, K (19:44)
***
[FRIDAY, XX/XX; 18:09||Rose Roof Restaurant, Tokyo]
Your friend does her research on both restaurant and even tried to bully you and Nanami about finding the name of this friend on the blind date. At this point, on another side of the city, a six foot, platinum blonde is dressed business casual, in a flower shop. His eyes are covered behind his darkened polarized eyeglasses as he floats between two bouquets.
“Your significant other’s best friend? You set me up with her?”
Walking to the counter, he pays for a small bouquet of gardenias.
“Listen Gojo, there is a lot of evils in the world, the least we could is give these two is a sense of knowing what it feels like to be loved and to an extent safe,” Nanami withdraws a cigarette and as he lights it, he observes you turning in your sleep. A warm smile on his face as the blonde notices the peaceful look you have while you shuffle in his sheets.
“You’re in love,” this sunglass wearer teases his friend as he steps into the next available taxi.
The man on the other line inhales and exhales as he extinguishes his cigarette.
“And may YN’s love protect me,” the wind blows from his dwelling as his blonde streaks tickle his face. He wishes his friend good luck on his upcoming date.
Several minutes later, your best friend waits in the lobby of the restaurant. After many over-thought-out outfits, you help Haru choose formal capris and loose fitting blouse with low heeled wedge boots in case of inclement weather.
Gojo Satoru, in all his years alive, has never been starstruck by a stranger’s modest appearance. The plastic which the bouquet is wrapped in, crinkles a bit as a set of nervous energy leaves his fingertips.
She walks by him twice before he works up the confidence to say her name and she pauses, not believing her luck. The first thing she notices is his playful smile, then his slight tremble when he offers the bouquet.
“These are gorgeous,” whiffs the violets and flashes a smile to him. “Thank you…”
Gojo clears his throat before extending his arm to her: “Shall we Haru-san?”
The host at the doorway to the restaurant calls for the Gojo party and the pair enters.
They did say, “love looks not with the eyes, but the mind,” and here two closed off from love people crack the window to let the other settle in the sun a bit. .
Over dinner, Gojo entertains your friend with international travel stories and your friend, secretly as bookish as you, seems to be able to quote Shakespeare; your friend texts you an update right before dessert arrives. This date goes as pleasantly as one may think, smith the dreadful eyes of several creatures invisible to those around him, begin to whisper just how pretty the ‘strongest sorcerer’s date’ would be with their organs ripped out of them…so, Gojo just smiles as your friend tells him about the time they almost drowned in rip current on a day with no rip current warnings near their grandparents’ beach side residence.
“I was nine,” their voice says so casually. “I hit my head against some coral stone. Luckily there were no starving sharks nearby.”
“Luckily indeed,” Gojo says as he reaches across the table and a quiet, “May I?”
Across from him, your friend simply nods when he tilts her face up and to the side with his fingertips and there above her brow and close to the hairline is a scar of a clawmark. The coral wasn’t a coral after all…a warning at best is what Gojo thinks this story is. Perhaps there is more to your friend than either you or Nanami might know, but for now, considering they can’t see the mayhem about to surround you, Gojo decides to banish them all with a flick of his wrist.
The flowers rest on the table as a lemon tart with blueberries is delivered.
“So, Satoru, on a scale from one to ten,” spoon in hand, the first bite is taken. “How likely is it that you'd ask me out again?”
He has this pondering look on his face, before he clears his throat and answers with a clearer mind as he helps in eating the dessert.
It’s not until the bill is paid for and your friend is escorted by him back to the lobby where he kisses her burning blushed cheek:
“Morikami Gardens is holding a tea party,” his voice is low in a whisper before he gives her the day and time to meet. Gojo grazes his thumb over the moon lit cheek of his date contemplating whether or not this feeling in his chest is excitement or foreboding. He has lost the one person so precious to him, will he be able to handle that grief again?
“A tea party?”
The flowers in her hand sway in the wind.
“I’d love to go…Never been to the gardens at night.”
Hailing a cab, your friend looks over her shoulder at the handsome, not so much a stranger after this one date, “Pleasure to to have met your acquaintance, Gojo Satoru.”
“Such a formal goodbye, Haruka,” he pouts a bit as he ushers her into the taxi.
Although she smiles up at him, Gojo was not prepared to see such a cheeky glimmer in her eyes.
“Pick me up early and I’ll give you a better hello at my door,” she winks at him before the driver pulls away and back into the busy night streets of Tokyo.
The once labeled strongest feels his knees go weak at that.
***
Nearly a month later, you visit your friend and find her in a darkened state. She doesn’t know why the guy she went on a date with would be leaving the country the same week and not tell her anything. You tell her to sit on the couch with your help and you’ll make some coffee for the two of you.
Surely there had to be a reason, work maybe? Is all you seem to think as you trap the send button to Nanami who’s heading out for some light groceries. He calls you instead and as you finish putting the rest of the pot into your friend’s mug, Nanami tells you the truth.
“YN, don’t let her know just yet, but Gojo’s been severely injured on the job: he’s got these nasty looking injuries…”
“What?!” You whisper yell into the receiver.
Nanami pinches the better of his nose as he sighs right before he makes a call for his better judgment and informs you he’s at the hospital right now too (getting stitched up after another fight with a different curse this time).
You drink your coffee as calmly as you can and you tell him to stay where he is—
“I’m coming to get you, stay there.”
You hand your friend her mug of coffee and she asks you if everything in your paradise is alright.
“No, it’s not, but before I elaborate, Haruka, go take a shower and change into something comfortable: we’re going to Ropongi General.”
“The historic hospital? Why?” She inquired.
“I’ll explain when you’re out, just please,” you don’t mean to sound so parental, but she does listen to you.
Twenty-five minutes later, on the drive there, with you behind the wheel, you inform your friend of her date’s sudden ‘disappearance’.
“…you’re kidding.”
You focus on the road ahead silently shaking your head.
Scoffing, “You’re serious? A-and the same people attacked Nanami? But he’s one of the strongest people we know.”
Aggravated, you shift gears as you go uphill to the building with the flickering green and red lights. The red indicates where the parking garage is and the green is for the entrance. You rush first to the Emergency Entrance and are greeted by a rather portly nurse who tries to get you to sign in, but you, instead, cause a raucous bellowing out Nanami's name.
Haruka, thankfully arrives and takes the sign in sheet and signs both your names.
Nanami eventually pokes his stitched head out behind a curtain and he sees you being kindly dragged back to the nurses station so your visitors' badges can be printed.
Calmly, you bare your teeth at the nurse who hands you and your best friend the temporary sticker badges you peel and stick on your clothes, revealing how your bite is most definitely worse than the words you’re about to hurl at your blonde boyfriend from accounting.
“Curtain 13,” the nurse calls out from behind the station.
You growl a thank you and stomp off.
“Sorry about her…she usually has a decent personality,” your friend says as she follows behind.
Inside, Haruka sits in the corner where the extra chair is and you sternly look at the stitches on your boyfriend’s face.
“What’s gotten into you lately?” Your cup his face when he won’t look at you. His face goes from cold to warm when you speak to him. He’s half undressed as you noticed the bruises that had begun to form on his side.
“Bruised ribs?” you whisper and he winces as he nods.
“Y’know on the phone I thought you were here to see your friend,” you continue. “Haruka is here to see him too.”
She rises from her seat, looking dejected yet an odd sense of hope shines in this fluorescent lit room.
“Suite 111, ICU,” Nanami said.
Your friend nods and leaves you two alone.
“She may not want to hear it, but I do. Nanami, what happened?”
Nanami rests his head on your shoulder and although you’re quite smaller than he is, he just breathes, ragged, and slow. How much of the truth about the sorcerer world does he want to let you in on? How many more fights does he have left in him if the whispers the curses said to him are true: Kenjaku is looking for a fight and if it means threatening those close to the small community that is left, then you’re directly going to be in the line of fire…and so is Haruka, so Nanami leads with a bit of truth.
“Gojo’s family is a bit out of touch: they’re old Japanese money rich. Satoru’s name is synonymous with playboy antics and little responsibility—his job, his ‘real’ job involves being in dangerous conditions 99% of the time.”
“…and this is the one time he’s been injured this badly?”
Nanami’s silence is all the answer you need.
“A month, yn, he’d been medically comatose for a month,” Nanami’s voice is serious and strained. He’s had lost one too many friends in the past, it’s why his social circle typically included you, your best friend, and occasionally the menace that was his ‘Senpai’ in high school.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” You pull the chair around to sit and rest your hands against his knees.
“Because I didn’t want them to follow you,” his answer makes sense.
You nod and let him know you’re glad he’s alright.
Elsewhere, your two closest friends are in another room entirely. The sound of a machine helping the once proud Gojo Satoru breathe becomes ambient background noise. Haruka reads the bracelet on his wrist. The admittance date on it reads the Thursday before your affixed garden date.
His vitals register above his head; you finally see the reasons being his long sleeved preference. Scars, keloid ones at that too, from either previous fights with dangerous people or attempts to end it all, litter his arms in every angle. Someone wanted him dead, but the patient hangs on like the quite charming stubborn man he is.
“You can come closer,” a nurse says in a gentle voice.
Footsteps lighter than begin to propel her forward, closer to the bed. The nurse continues to change the wires of the various IV drips he is on.
“Talk to him, who knows? It might be what he needs, isn’t that right Mr Gojo?”
You chuckle at her loving demeanor for an older nurse who seems like she was his mother.
“The violets you gave me finally entered away…,” she begins to say. He’s in really bad shape, the nurse notices how his head is bandaged down and around his eyes. The nurse carries on and right before she leaves, she looks at the two of them.
“…Tragedies and miracles happen everyday…”
The nurse closes the door of the suite to grant them privacy.
“Excuse me?” Haruka turns around to just hear the door close. The whirring of the machines draws her attention back to where his chest rises and falls.
Upon hearing the door click, your friend whispers against his peach-fuzz cheek. She chuckles at the haphazard beard he grows in his unconscious state before inhaling a nervous breath.
“You were supposed to pick me up for the garden tea party about a month ago…now I see why you weren’t able to come,” Haruka isn’t an emotional person really.
She isn’t known to be soft and delicate; quite the opposite really. Loud, rambunctious, funny, those were all a cover to hide the anxious wreck within.
“Normally, no one would be upset going to hospitals to visit those who were knew, but with the increase in tsunamis and the occasional landslide, Haruka doesn’t fair all too well with hospitals overall,” you confess to Nanami when he pulls you up to sit next to him. “She lost so much before we met in college, I think seeing Gojo will either be cathartic or traumatic for her.”
You exhale a deep breath, after he kisses your forehead, yet in the ICU unit, Haruka attempts to calm herself as she peers over Gojo’s bed. She reaches over to hold his hand.
“You’re still warm,” she laughs a bit. “I thought you stood me up you know, but never, never in my wildest imagination would it be because you’re in a coma. If you ever wake up, I’d give you one chance to tell me the truth, ok?…”
There are a million thoughts that go through one’s mind when in a hospital: some are positive and aligning to the living and healing; others are negative, full of grief and despair through the trials of keeping the people alive. Alas, here in the ICU of the notoriously historical Roppongi Hospital, one powerful sorcerer’s willingness to walk back to the world of the living makes him croak out a dry, “ok.”
Haruka, for all intents and purposes, should have screamed for help or at the very least pushed the call nurse button, but she didn't. She looks at the hand holding hers now and breathes a sigh of relief. Friend or not, this was not the way anyone ought to be spending a second, yet highly recommended improperly timed, date and she lets him know that head on.
Several minutes later, nurses and doctor on duty visit the room and do their own tests, conducting a series of “which IV we keep and which we can discard” conversations. Haruka steps outside for a bit of a breather and slides down to the floor with the wall of the hospital as her support. Her hands shake as she texts you about her once blind date waking up within the hour. You tell your boyfriend of the development and help him into his clothes after the discharge papers are signed.
Several glasses of water later, you’re back in the room, Gojo sits up with a relaxed smile on his unwrapped face; the scratches by his eyes are just that, scratches. His eyes are still that brilliant, lightest shade of iced sapphires when he looks at Haruka who just stands at the foot of his bed.
“For what it’s worth,” Gojo scratches his cheek with his free hand. “Hearing you scold me is refreshing.”
He beckons her forth and she obeys, choosing to sit on his right side.
“I suppose you’d want to hear how I got in this bed, injured and all,” he says.
Haruka, for whatever it’s worth, shakes her head to decline.
“Later, Satoru,” and his cheerful demeanor lessens until she walks up to him and pushes his hair back a bit to place a kiss above his brow. “Tell me when I come back after I get something to eat.”
As she glances at him, she notices the flushed color of his cheeks before waving a swift ‘bye for now’ when she steps out the doorway.
However, with her presence gone, Gojo’s mind replays a voice he hasn’t heard in a very long time: “I cursed you a little at the end too.”
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𝑴𝑬𝑬𝑻 𝑲𝑬𝑲𝑬 ♛
𝘼𝘽𝙊𝙐𝙏 𝙈𝙀…
hi!! my name is MaKeyah🌷 but you can call me keke, key, keyah, allat! it’s easier anyways lmaooo, 9teen, black, a may taurus (yuhh hehe), currently in school but not really thinking abt going back, and i live in a fake state😋
𝙈𝙔 𝙄𝙉𝙏𝙀𝙍𝙀𝙎𝙏𝙎…
film
books
pop culture
plants and flowers
redecorating
𝙒𝙀 𝙎𝙄𝙈𝙋𝙄𝙉𝙂..?
the answer is always yes ☝🏽
spider-verse — peter parker (andrew and tom’s version), miles morales, hobie brown, spider-noir, miguel o’hara, and felicia hardy
aot — eren jeager, armin arlert, hange zoe, levi ackerman, jean kirstein, reiner (on occasion), and mikasa ackerman
demon slayer — uzui tengen, rengoku kyojuro, giyuu tomioka, sanemi (on occasion), yoriichi and muzan
mcu — matt murdock, wade wilson, frank castle, bucky barnes, sam wilson, bruce banner (avengers assemble series), thor, wolverine, storm, marc spector/steven grant, t’challa, steve rogers (only age of ultron and winter soldier), and druig
jjk — gojo satoru, geto suguru, nanami kento, maki zenin, megumi fushiguro, yuuji itadori, inumaki toge, and yuta okkotsu
𝙃𝙀𝘼𝘿𝙋𝙃𝙊𝙉𝙀𝙎 𝙊𝙉…🎧
my music taste varies but… sza, yeat, kaytranada, ice spice, beyoncé, tyler the creator, frank ocean, the wallows, billie eilish, playboi carti, the neighbourhood, arctic monkeys, rihanna, sade, kendrick lamar, metro boomin, megan thee stallion, normani, ariana grande, pinkpantheress, the weeknd, doja cat, miguel, odetari, chloexhalle, baby keem, childish gambino, brent faiyaz, 21 savage, cardi b, givēon, and many more…
𝙊𝙉 𝙍𝙀𝙋𝙀𝘼𝙏…🎧
deli : ice spice
got it good : kaytranada ft. craig david
flawlëss : yeat ft. lil uzi very
new jeans : newjeans
𝙎𝙄𝙍𝙀𝙉 🤍 𝙏𝙃𝙄𝙎…
my girlfriend, my friends, watching youtube, baking, baking, plants, shoes (mainly crocs fr…they’re comfy), anime, scary movies, films in general, my cat zeus, marvel, sometimes dc, drawing, tattoos, discord and many more…
𝙇𝙐𝙓𝙐𝙍𝙔 𝙁𝘼𝙑𝙀𝙎…
youtubers : coryxkenshin, dashie, berleezy, kyahnextdoor, monet mcmichael, and deb smikle
movies : coraline, the conjuring series, everything, everything, it, any spider-man movie (except amazing spider-man 2)
color(s) : sage green, purple, red, black, brown, baby blue, white, pastel yellow, and baby pink
books : they both die at the end, beautiful creatures, good girl’s guide to murder, we were liars
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Journal Entry / Those Who Stay
A previous version of this post included the title supplements “(The Butcher of Loneliness, pt. 2; [Courtship, pt. 5]),” which made the top aggressively ugly and also abstruse. None the less, one should consider this entry as the fifth in a much-dislocated series. —The Editors
—
A stranger messaged me the other day, congratulating me on my Anne Carson tour. It seems I’d avoided her for two decades and then this last month [November] I read most of her work and posted about it, indiscriminately, nearly every night, on my IG story. Obv the accolades piled in, unstoppable. Indeed, I read most of her books in the span of two weeks—whatever I could find at the booksellers or online or through resellers, eager for her matter-of-fact eloquence on Greek historians, Proust’s long “fairy tale,” and then the remarks on Woolf (and why? I’ve barely read thru Swann’s Way). I was walking nearly 12 miles a day like the city varmint they track on TikToks. These were long walks to wear me down and they filled my heels with a bolting pain that pulsed, even in bed, even after taking many ibuprofen. I became lean like varmint, too. Running was an absolute nightmare but I ran anyway and obv you know this.
What did I imagine Carson wrote versus what does she actually write? | thought she occupied herself with academic exercises—frosty, formal reports from the edge of translation, with some personal assaying inside. Crone’s notes; old lady vibes; sententious from her years collecting the high-finance prizes. (Thus I am both stupid and sexist.) I liked Autobiography of Red in grad school but couldn't follow the plot. [Falling out of the plot is a great fear of mine.] Her compendium of chapbooks, Float, has flashes of Frank O’Hara’s chatty list poems (“Eras of Yves Klein” and “How to Like ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ By Gertrude Stein”), and a very funny aside on style in “Merry Christmas from Hegel”: “You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot about Hegel or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying he was fed up with popular criticism of his terrible prose.” Ancient playwrights made themselves known as ghostships do by creaking thru fog. These encounters were diverting but not fastening, perhaps because they were, let’s be frank, scraps, one-offs, anecdotes, whose audience could be best described as friends and family. What was her deal with the Brontës? The difficulty with pronouns? I wasn’t family yet. I hadn’t read enough. I was a younger man. My circumstances changed. I was presumed to fall out of love, pathetically so. I fell back in love with someone who didn’t love me back—a feeling whose use-value accounts for a world literature rich in sympathetic losers. It was an excellent time to read one Anne Carson.
She writes a lot about not getting what you want. I discovered, with Glass, Irony & God, that she’s never found peace with the lover who abandoned her (“It is stunning... when one’s lover comes in and says I do not love you anymore”) and that her oeuvre may well be a perduring dialog with that loss. In Plainwater, published the same year, she opens her “Anthropology of Water” by prefacing, “Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried. Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands”; and in the ominous poem “New Rule” from Men in the Off Hours, “The night of hooks?// The man blade left open on the stair?/ Not enough spin on it, said my true love/ when he left in our fifth year.” Then in Decreation, re the Bloomsbury set, with its members at last in matrimonial equipoise, Carson shits on the premise of their futurity:
I wonder if they paused to look at each other, these mated and unmated people, on the exposed plane of an ordinary moment of that curious, heavy, historic, wrong day. Sudden feeling of oldness. Black upland wind. Bring a coat, they had been told, and a piece of smoked glass. It will get cold. It will hurt your eyes. Totality is lightless, and should be colourless, yet may intensify certain questions that hang at the back of the mind. What is a spouse after all? Will this one stay, can this one keep me alive?
I mean, it wasn't exactly a great time to be alive. Two world wars, bad cures for cancer, and the ungenial environment for genius women. Still, you get the sense her worry’s sincere; she wants these aristocratic oddballs to find some warmth, some flame of reason. Carson’s apocalyptic scene-setting puts me in mind of Bo Bartlett's Dreamland, a painting full of strange celebrants on their way from a wedding. They are curious, serious, strolling up a hill. A few appear to look back at their viewers. There’s a bride, a pilot, a priest, a baby with a crown; a lady rich in her furs; and leading them all, a fool.
—
In The Paris Review, Carson describes a childhood moving past fixed friendships as her father moved from bank to bank in Canadian backwaters. Uprooted every few years, she regarded her schoolmates as bad bets; better to shy away from relations whose half-life guaranteed painful, present decay. (These are facts. My mom suffered same as a preacher’s daughter, leaving midwest ministries every three years or so for the next Methodist parsonage. I asked her what that was like, and she said, “I was always learning new rules. I never understood them. What music people liked. How I should dress. What was funny. I made good grades and was very pretty but was teased constantly because I was quiet and the minister was my dad and I tried always to be nice. I felt very alone.” Another comp: Anne Carson’s father and my mother’s father both died of premature, catastrophic, late-stage Alzheimer’s.)
When you’re young, you learn how to keep people close: you learn to trust that they last and even if they don’t last, you at least learn that faculty of trust (that people stay), which is a kind of peace. Trust-breakers remain outliers. They do not pertain to a worldview of paralyzing detachment. But “I’ll be leaving,” thought Carson; “this won’t last.” Her work continually makes evident that it has never resolved, never made sense of leaving, and that she has never learned enough from it to move on. Further, her work emphasizes that she has chosen not to move on. That, sometimes, choosing obsessive disappointment is as liberating and galvanizing as choosing what we superficially call “freedom.” “I’ve avoided enlightenment resolutely,” she says. “As it is, I’m just sad.”
In her brother’s epitaph, Carson includes Michael’s note admonishing her, “Don’t go back to the farm don’t go alone,” and, “Put the past away you have to.” The siblings were not only worlds but timescales apart. He wrote from Copenhagen where he was hard-scrabbling, existing on cigarettes and shopkeeping—but wifed-up—still, insect-pinned to a crime he committed in 1978 and never going home. Meanwhile, Anne led university students in Michigan through cases of Attic Greek (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and vocative) and composed odd poems about ruined expectations. On the one hand, several millennia of precedent: Simonides of Keos, Herodotos, Sokrates [her characteristic spelling favors a k where other scholars rely on the less economic ch], Archilochos, Augustine, Basho, Sartre. On the other, she inhabited estranging tactics: Is this a poem or prose translation? Is this a poem or academic gloss? Is this a poem or… opera? And then too the voices of dead starlets, Free French mystics, Romanian-born/German-language suicides, and (famously, for Anne Carson) Sappho. Her brother wrote “don’t go back” and “put the past away” but seemed sorely oblivious to her present case. Up stakes? From where? How can you return to where you’ve never left? How do you come back from where you’ve never gone, etc. (I’m asking for myself.)
Alice, a character in Complicite’s Mnemonic, tells her ex-lover Virgil, “You have to wait now and this time you follow,” crazing him. “Can you hear the inherent contradiction in that?” he reports to a friend, continuing:
You have to wait and follow. It’s impossible. And I suddenly realized what’s happening to her . . . What’s going on is that she’s feeding back on herself. It’s feedback, turbulence. Her internal state is like weather. Our internal lives are a mystery. We don’t even know what causes us to sleep. My doctor can tell me I’ve got insomnia but he doesn’t know how or why.
I write that Anne Carson has never made sense of leaving, never moved on, and yet her formative years were spent in transit, dislocated, grasping and still removed. In her “Praise of Sleep,” she ends remarks on Elizabeth Bishop, Virginia Woolf, The Odyssey, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Plato’s Krito with an ode whose last line reads: “Exit wound, as they say.” I consider this a hypothetical—a pretense—of feeling, because she hasn’t exited. Anne Carson is standing stock-still on blue icy hinterlands in dark Ontario. Others left, she stayed, and the wound (this is odd to say—actually, it’s certainly painful to write)—the wound is that we stay. If we exit, maybe we can find a goddam bandage or two. If we exit, maybe we can avoid further harm? In a play, as in life, exits create new scenes. You actually have to leave to move elsewhere, to move on. Acknowledging this is obv v silly but that doesn’t make it wrong. I corrected a friend on the same matter a few days ago: “This is not a metaphor.”
“An epitaph is a way of thinking about death and gives consolation,” says Carson, in The Economy of the Unlost. “Salvation occurs, through the act of attention that forms stone into memory, leaving residue of greater life. I am speaking subjectively. There is no evidence of salvation except a gold trace in the mind.”
Here my patience quavers.
Memory isn’t stone; it’s a blood sponge with connective neural byways and low electric activity. And gold is not found in persons whatsoever—not the element [unless thru surgery]—and only meekly by virtue of right action, as a simile, and a tired one.
—
[The sorrow of] unrequited love compels its sufferers to do strange things. Sometimes monstrous things. Of course requited love feeds upon its own vagaries—obsessive texting; fucking in closets at parties; betraying your right conscience to do wrong things (e.g, the one time I went on a big gay camping trip while my grandmother died, not too far away, to shore up my relations with a man. My brothers, who’d flown in to comfort my mother, found my absence unspeakably bizarre). Success in love absorbs these bursts of mania and incorporates them rather too smoothly into the usual narratives of banal romantic triumph. A rehearsal dinner’s tear-stained anecdotes; the party fodder; nostalgia. And despite the severity of love’s work in these broken measures, the idiocy of courtship (and situationship and relationship) have become a civic pastime—a tax some lucky ones pay to perdure in the dreamscape of public life as married, home-owning child-bearers.
You have to be absolutely nuts. Just out of your mind. You have to be so accommodating, nearly incorporeal, to integrate another’s habits and tastes. Their family—and that family’s customs? You have to know how much regular sex to expect, and money, and if perhaps you care to swing when you travel? Obviously I could not. But then, the happily-in-love don’t write essays on love. They bask cage-jawed behind love’s silencing muzzle. The happily-in-love are editors or novelists or reporters. There are no stings for them, no impalements, and they are galvanized to look elsewhere for the stories of their day. They’re great gossips, for instance, in the miseries of the unloved, because the unloved bring them news.
[fragment ends]
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Does this app get used by anyone anymore?
If it doesn’t, cool, free place to put my thoughts.
If it does, I hope whoever’s reading is doing well.
It’s been a long time since I felt like writing anything here so here’s a little life update.
My roommate moved out about 6 months ago. I miss having him here sometimes, but I’m so happy for him and his girlfriend. I love that man like my own brother and it’s so amazing to see them doing life together.
My job has been nuts. I’ve finally reached a level in my career where I have sway, I can make a difference in my company, in others lives. I genuinely enjoy the work I’ve been doing and I’m so excited when I hear that the work we do has helped someone improve their business. A client sent me a watch as a thank you. I cried.
I’m finally getting out there and seeing the world. Granted, I’ve been limited to this country, but Portugal is coming up soon. It’s hard to believe 3 years ago I’d never been on a plane. I flew over 30,000 miles last year. Sure it was mostly for work, but it’s exciting nonetheless.
The downside with a lot of work travel: dating has been tough. There’s been a few times I genuinely thought things were going somewhere, but the timing just hasn’t been right. At the end of the day: the right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.
Outside of work, I’ve loved being an uncle. My niece is adorable and too smart to believe for a 4 year old. Spoiling her with gifts for Christmas and her birthday has been fun, and that smile when she says “Uncle Joey!” Takes all the stress away. I’m so glad my relationship with my sister has improved over the years. My family in general. I’ve never been closer with Tiffany, and I’m glad we’ve gotten to this point.
Same goes with Suzie, albeit to a much lesser extent. I don’t see her enough, but I think that’s mostly because she lives in the city and she’s engaged. That’s okay though. She’s actually happy and I’m so glad. Her fiance is dope and I actually like this dude a lot.
Dads good. He’s working from home, thank god. His new condo can be a pain at times, but I think he genuinely loves having a place he can truly call his own finally. When grandpa died, I was really worried. When Jeff died, I really didn’t know what was going to happen. Knowing he has a safe, comfortable, accessible place brings such peace of mind. He’s losing weight too, which is phenomenal. His aches and pains were getting to be a problem, and the fact he’s finally addressing it and taking care of himself is massive.
I’ve been reading a ton. I’ve already read 3 books this year, looking to read 30 by the end of 2024. It’s been a nice way to unwind after work. My healths been improved over the past year. I’ve been able to stop seeing the cardiologist every 3 months finally.
I play in a darts league every week on a team with my sister, brother in law, and some family friends. It’s been a nice hobby. Between that and baseball card collecting, I’ve been able to keep my hobbies safe and relatively cost-aware lol.
My friends are all in a bit of a transition period. It’s strange. If someone had told me I’d be in the most stable position of most of my friends a few years ago I wouldn’t have believed it. I’m happy to be here for support for all of them. I’m excited to see what these next chapters will be.
All in all though, I’m happy. I find myself smiling in moments to myself sometimes. It’s a nice change of pace.
“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern… It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.” - Frank O’Hara
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Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara
ON THE WAY TO SAN REMO
The black ghinkos snarl their way up
the moon growls at each blinking window
the apartment houses climb deafeningly into the purple
A bat hisses northwards
the perilous steps lead to a grate
suddenly the heat is bearable
The cross-eyed dog scratches a worn patch of pavement
his right front leg is maimed in the shape of a V
there's no trace of his nails on the street a woman cajoles
She is very old and dirty
she whistles her filthy hope
that it will rain tonight
The 6th Avenue bus trunk-lumbers sideways
it is full of fat people who cough as at a movie
they eat each other's dandruff in the flickering glare
The moon passes into clouds
so hurt by the street lights
of your glance oh my heart
The act of love is also passing like a subway bison
through the paper-littered arches of the express tracks
the sailor sobers he feeds pennies to the peanut machines
Though others are in the night
far away lips upon a dusty armpit
the nostrils are full of tears
High fidelity reposed in a box a hand on the windowpane
the sweet calm the violin strings tie a young man's hair
the bright black eyes pin far away their smudged curiosity
Yes you are foolish smoking
the bars are for rabbits
who wish to outlive the men
1954
***
AVE MARIA
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what
you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
they'll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing
hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn't upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the
Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up
in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
hating you
prematurely since you won't have done anything
horribly
mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a
TV set seeing
movies you wouldn't let them see when
they were young
1960
***
STEPS
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left
here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting's not so blue
where's Lana Turner
she's out eating
and Garbo's backstage at the Met
everyone's taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park's full of dancers and their tights and
shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the
West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we're all winning
we're alive
the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building's no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)
and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining
oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
1961
***
FOR THE CHINESE NEW YEAR & FOR BILL BERKSON (excerpt)
don't touch me because when I tremble it
makes a noise
***
POEM
Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up
1962
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MARVEL
Warnings = **
x teen!reader / x child!reader / x daughter!reader / x gn!reader / x reader / x sibling!reader
I don’t own Marvel or any of the characters in Marvel , I only own the imagines that I have created in tumblr or wattpad.
Main masterlist
MCU CHARACTERS
IMAGINE
Pizza & Cuddles ** - Kate Bishop x reader: You blind in one eye and Kate helps you get by
Family Reunion ** - Baron Zemo x teen!reader, Sam Wilson x teen!reader, Bucky Barnes x teen!reader: Zemo si your father and you have a bad relationship with him after what he did in CACW and he’s trying to fix your relationship (coming soon)
B-u-c-k-y? Bucky ** - father!Bucky Barnes x child!reader: The beginning of your relationship with your father and a glimpse at the progress
SERIES
Lead Me Home ** - Steve Rogers x sibling!reader, Bucky Barnes x Rogers!teen!reader, Sam Wilson x Rogers!teen!reader: you are Steve Rogers little sibling and Hydra kidnapped you after Steve disappeared, no one except Hydra knew what happened to you until today (coming soon)
HEADCANNON
Dating Kate Bishop Would Include ** - Kate Bishop x reader: what I imagine it would be like to date Kate Bishop
Dating Yelena Belova Would Include ** - Yelena Belova x reader: what I imagine it would be like to date Yelena Belova (coming soon)
Tony Stark as a Father ** - Tony Stark x teen!reader: what I imagine it would be like if Tony Stark was your father
Steve Rogers as a Father ** - Steve Rogers x teen!reader: what I imagine it would be like if Steve was your father
Being Star Lord’s daughter** - Peter Quill x daughter!reader: what it would be like to be Peter Quills daughter
Being Marc Spector’s sibling** - Marc Spector x teen!reader, (Steven Grant x teen!reader, Konshu x teen!reader, Jake Lockley x teen!reader): what I think it would be like to be Marc’s little sibling
X-MEN CHARACTERS
IMAGINE
SERIES
HEADCANNON
Being Logan’s daughter ** - Logan Howlett x daughter!reader: what I imagine it would be like to be Logan’s daughter
Being Logan’s ftm son **- Logan Howlett x ftm!son!reader: what it would be like if you were Logan’s ftm son
Being Deadpool’s daughter would include ** - Wade Wilson/Deadpool x teen!daughter!reader: what it would be like to be Deadpool’s daughter (coming soon)
DAREDEVIL • PUNISHER • VENOM • WEREWOLF BY NIGHT • SPIDER-VERSE
IMAGINE
Coffee Talks** - Frank Castle x teen!reader: you met Frank a while back at your fave coffee shop and since then you two have met up each weak to talk, only this time it’s not only Frank who has bruises all over his face
Birthday Special- Matt Murdock x teen!reader: it’s your birthday and Matt is the only one who knows how you really want to celebrate your birthday
Nonexistent Eating Patterns** - Matt Murdock x teen!reader: you haven’t been eating sleeping or drinking as you should and Matt is there to help
SERIES
Little Murder ** - Billy Russo x teen!reader: you try to get into Anvil so that you can learn how to protect yourself against your abusive parents, and in doing so you made Russo interested into why a teenager that’s too young to join the army wants to join Anvil which is made for ex-military to get a job, and eventually he finds out about your family situation. (Coming soon)
HEADCANNON
Being Eddie Brock’s daughter would include ** - Eddie Brock x teen!daughter!reader, Venom x teen!reader, Anne Weying x teen!daughter!reader: what I would be like to be Eddie Brock and Anne Weying’s daughter (coming soon)
Daredevil’s teen sidekick ** - Matt Murdock x teen!reader: what it would be like to be daredevil’s sidekick (coming soon)
Jack Russell adopting a child ** - Jack Russell x child!reader: Jack finds a child and decides to take care of it
Venom **- father Miguel O’Hara x teen!venom!reader: being Miguel O’Hara’s child while also being Venom/Spider-Man
MCU CAST
IMAGINE
You Okay Darling? ** - Tom Hiddleston x teen!reader: Tom helping you after a fight with your parents
SERIES
HEADCANNON
A Dream Come True - Jake Gyllenhaal x teen!reader: you persuade Jake to go to an amusement park
Tree House - Jake Gyllenhaal x child!reader: Jake building a tree house for you while in quarantine
Surprise - Jake Gyllenhaal x teen!reader: Jake (your father) gets surprised when he sees that you had taken home two dogs
#mcu x reader#x reader#marvel#marvel x reader#x teen#x teen!reader#jake gyllenhaal x teen#x you#mcu#captain america x reader#tom holland x reader#tom hiddleston x teen!reader#x-men#daredevil x reader#frank castle x reader#chris evans x daughter!reader#sebastian stan x teen!reader#loki x teen!reader#steve rogers x teen reader#deadpool x reader#peter parker x reader#Bucky Barnes x reader#baron zemo x daughter!reader#mcu cast x reader#benedict cumberbatch x teen!reader#venom x reader#eddie brock x teen!reader#magneto x teen!reader#logan howlett x teen#anthony mackie x teen!reader
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any quotes about love?
"As it is, I can’t settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me."
— Jeanette Winterson, from ‘Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit’
"You do not always know what I am feeling. / Last night in the warm spring air while I was / blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't interest / me, it was love for you that set me afire,"
— Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara; from ‘For Grace, After a Party’
"To say we were 'in love', that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other."
— Iris Murdoch, from 'The Sea, the Sea'
"Love is the one thing stronger than desire and the only proper reason to resist temptation."
— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Written on the Body'
"Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly / flames everywhere."
— Richard Siken, Crush; from ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out’
"There is the heat of Love, / the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, / irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad."
— Homer, from 'The Iliad', tr. Robert Fagles
"Falling in love / is glamorous hell;"
— Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture; from 'You'
"…Love’s a grand solace, isn’t it, my friend? Deep and dark as sleep."
— Jean-Paul Sartre, from 'No Exit', tr. Stuart Gilbert
"Love never hesitates to draw blood."
— Rumi, The Forbidden Rumi: The Suppressed Poems of Rumi on Love, Heresy, and Intoxication; from ‘Death Is Life For You’, tr. Will Johnson & Nevit Ergin
"I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will."
— Sylvia Plath, from 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath'
"...the Eskimoes had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love."
— Margaret Atwood, from 'Surfacing'
"Love alters all. Unblood my instinct, love."
— Theodore Roethke, Words for the Wind; from ‘The Renewal’
"It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them."
— Gabriel García Márquez, from ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ tr. Edith Grossman
"I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says – I love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely, and altogether."
— Emily Brontë, from ‘Wuthering Heights’
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Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O’Hara
Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.
Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.
Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)
St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.
Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
“Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.
I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.
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Five Senses: Sight (with Bonus Boy)
Billy Russo: You were the first thing Billy saw in his dreams overseas. No matter what horrors he had seen or committed that day, no matter how much blood was on his hands when he laid down to rest, no matter the dirt under his nails or the sweat on his skin, every night, he dreamt of you. And in his dreams, he was cleansed by you. In his dreams, Billy would see your bright eyes and that smile, that special smile you had for him and him alone, and no matter what atrocities he had seen or done, that smile would heal him. That smile, your smile, would warm him down to his bones--and that wasn’t a metaphor, it was true. Huddled in a flimsy tent with Frank and 12 other men, a freezing rain pouring down all around, nothing but a thin blanket and his fatigues to keep him covered, but Billy was warm. When he saw you, he was engulfed by your warmth, by your smile, by your love. Just the sight of you, dream or not, was enough to put Billy at easy, no matter where he was in the world. He’d memorized every part of you, and he pictured you, inch by glorious inch, when he needed your comfort. It wasn’t as good as being with you, of course, but it was a saving grace for him, and Billy was not a man who easily settled into being saved...unless his hero was you.
Logan Delos: Logan was a man of wealth and taste. He’d been born into his riches, and he’d become desensitized to many of the incredible things he’d seen in his time. He had seen sights that would leave an ordinary men speechless, had gone places that were normally closed off to public eyes. It didn’t faze him. Indescribable sights, things people would save up all their lives to see, seen and shrugged off within seconds by Logan. But the sight of you? Damn. You could drop him to his knees. Logan had just gotten off of his private Delos jet after spending a week lounging in the most decadent suite he could find in Abu Dhabi; the view had been described as “breathtaking”, but Logan hadn’t found himself having any difficult breathing as he looked out at the expansive city, drowned in orange by the sunset. But now, as Logan walked into your shared penthouse, he was breathless. You were laid out on the couch, the TV playing softly in the background, and you were fast asleep. It wasn’t an elegant sleep; you weren’t Scarlett O’Hara draped over a satin lounge chair, you were you, knocked out in the middle of the afternoon wearing one of his shirts. And you were, without a doubt, without exaggeration, the most exquisite thing he’d ever seen. Wordlessly, because he was speechless, Logan sat on the edge of the couch and reached out to you. Looking at you, your mouth slightly open, wearing his shirt, you arm splayed across your forehead, Logan felt himself melt. Truly, you were the most striking sight he had ever seen.
Jax Teller: Seeing Jax dressed all in orange, chains around his ankles, two armed guards on either side of him, should have made you sad. It should have made you realize that, as much as you loved Jax, he was a criminal, and moments like this were bound to happen again and again if you stayed with him. You should leave--now, while you still could. But when he sat across from you, and you looked into those blue eyes of his... You knew that you weren’t going anywhere. “Talked to my Mom earlier,” he said, settling into his seat, “she said my bail should be posted in a few days, and then I’ll be home... I’m sorry, darling, I know this isn’t what you signed up for--” “How much more does Gemma need for bail?” You asked, watching as his eyes widened. “Babe, you don’t have to--” “I’m gonna be your Old Lady some day,” you answered back, “I need to learn how to do this.” You watched as his smile spread, his eyes wrinkling. “You’re gonna be my Old Lady, huh?” He said back. You leaned forward, making sure he was looking right into your eyes. You could see a warmth in them when he looked at you, an affection there that was for you, and you only. “I love you, Jax, and I’m gonna spend the rest of my life with you. But in order to do that, we need to get you out of this place. So come on, tell me how much she needs to make your bail.” He chuckled, and leaned in as well, “You don’t realize how much I needed to see you...to hear you say that,” he reached out for your hand, and you looked down and smiled at the sight of his hand in yours, “You’re a sight for sore eyes, darlin’.”
Coco Cruz: The doctor said his eyes would heal, but it would be a while. And though he was a sniper, Coco wasn’t a patient man. You sat on the bed, watching him pace around in circles in your shared bedroom. “Coco,” you sighed. “What if my eyes never get better?” He asked, stopping and turning to you, the white patch over his injured eye wrinkled as he frowned. “Coco...” “What if I can never ride again? Or use a fucking gun? How am I gonna work?” “Coco...” He fell to his knees in front of the bed, and you reached out and caressed his face. His dark brown eye was watery with emotion, and you heart clenched at the pain you could see there. “What if I can’t see our baby?” He asked, his hand going to rest on your growing stomach. You felt tears spring to your eyes, but you held them back. “You will. Okay? The doctor said it can be treated, and it’ll take rehab and time, but you will see again. I promise you.” Coco nodded, leaning into you for a hug. You closed your eyes, wishing you could give him the gift of sight, wishing you could will him to heal faster. But you couldn’t. All you could do--all either of you could do--was wait. And wait you did. And the day your baby girl was born, the first thing she saw was Coco, his eyes filled with tears as he looked down at his newborn child. It had taken a lot of work, cost him so much time and pain, but it was all worth it when he could hold his baby girl in his arms and look into her eyes, his vision fully restored. It was worth the wait.
Angel Reyes: You and Angel had made your New Year’s resolutions together, and working out more had been at the top of the list. You’d both agreed that the two of you should exercise more, and it made sense to do it together and motivate one another, but now that you were here... You could see that it was a mistake. Watching a shirtless, sweaty Angel lift weights, his low grunts filling the air, was beyond distracting. It was erotic. He grinned at you, a dumbbells slung behind his gleaming shoulders. You wanted to lick the beads of sweat trailing down his tattoos. “You good, baby?” He teased, an eyebrow raised at you. You swallowed, your eyes unable to look away from the perfection that was Angel Reyes. “I--good. Yup. Good,” you said, watching the bulge in Angel’s shorts as he squatted down. “Mm, very well constructed sentence there,” he said, straightening up and placing the dumbbell on the rack. You stared at his ass as he turned around, and you felt your skin flush with the heat of desire. It should be illegal for one man to look so good. After all, this was a public place and here Angel was just being a fucking piece of art. “Babe, stop staring, you’re gonna make me blush,” he teased you, “Shh,” you dug into your pocket and pulled out your phone, “Don’t mind me. Keep working.” “Are you taking pictures of me?” “Maybe,” you answered, biting your lip as you snapped another picture, “Keep working out, this is good inspiration.” He laughed, doing as you said. By the end of your session, Angel had worked up quite a sweat, and you had amassed an impressive amount of sexy photos of your man. All in all, it was a good workout.
Miguel Galindo: There was nothing like the sight of Miguel in cartel mode. Every step, every glance, every twitch of his eyebrow turned you on. He stood behind his desk, both hands spread out over the papers and files that covered it, glaring at the men in the room. He was the very picture of power. You stood off to the die, summoned there to be a witness, your eyes fixated on your man. You watched the words spill from his mouth, you watched the men--powerful in their own right--visibly shrink as Miguel spoke. The topic of conversation wasn’t important to you; Miguel had all of your attention. You stared openly, your eyes going from his sinful mouth down to his large hands, watching them flex as he gestured over at the men. His eyes were hard, eyebrows furrowed as he showed his displeasure with his employees. Distantly, you heard their apologizes and his acceptance of them, but really, all you could do was drink in the sight that was your husband. He was in his element, as much as Miguel wanted to go legit, and as well suited to that world he was, he was a cartel man. It was in his blood. And it came naturally to him. You watched as he lifted his hand and pointed to the door; you could see the men scurry out from the corner of your eye, but your focus was on Miguel. He turned to you, a smirk growing on his kissable lips. “I can see what you’re thinking, mi amor,” he purred, “Why don’t you come over here and let me give you what you want?”
Nick Amaro: As soon as Nick saw you, he grabbed you. He held you tight, his eyes closing, visions of you hurt and afraid playing behind his eyelids. “I’m alright, Nick,” you assured him, whispering into the crook of his neck, “I’m alright...” He nodded, finally pulling back to have a look at you. There was blood on your face, and he reached out to wipe it, leaving a soft red smear on your cheeks. “Don’t ever do that again,” he huffed, his eyes boring into yours, “Never, okay?” “Nick,” you said carefully, running a hand through his hair, “you know I can’t promise that,” you watched his jaw clench, “if I’m the only thing between a perp and a victim, I’m going to stand in front f the victim, every time.” He closed his eyes again, trying not to see the truth in yours. “Nick,” you repeated his name until he opened his eyes again, “I’m fine. You had my back. Liv had my back. I’m safe, and so it that little girl.” You turned, taking his hand in yours. “Look,” you directed him gently. A few feet away, the little girl who’d been kidnapped was in the arms of her sobbing mother, safe and sound. The man who’d taken here was in the back of a bus, bleeding from the gunshot you’d given him. “We did that,” you told Nick, looking up at him, “Look at that girl. She’s the reason we do what we do. She’s the reason I can’t promise I won’t ever do this again.” He nodded, turning back to you and taking you in his arms. “I know,” he said, kissing your forehead, “Just... Next time, don’t leave my line of sight, okay? Can you at least do that?” You smiled, “I can do that.”
Johnny Tuturro: Johnny looked like a god, Apollo in the flesh. He was bathed in light, the rays of the sun shining on his brown skin, his smile wide and warm. You stood on the beach, Jakes on one side of you, Charlie on the other, and you didn’t even try to hide the fact that you were staring at Johnny. And really--who could blame you? He, Mike, and Briggs had just come to shore after catching a few waves, and Johnny was looking like a freaking dream. “Damn girl, stop drooling,” Briggs joked as he walked past you, taking Charlie’s hand and leading her away. Mike and Jakes laughed, following suit, and you watched, not at all concerned with the others, as Johnny approached you. “Wanna take a dip?” He asked. You shook your head, your hands immediately going to his chest, “Why are you like this?” “Like what?” “Like... this!” You stepped back, gesturing to his everything. “Look at you! You’re freaking glowing, you got the abs all out... Keep playing, and I’m gonna put a baby in you.” Johnny laughed, and the sight of him, skin glistening in the sunlight, water pooling in the deep crevices of his collarbones, had you clenching with desire. He leaned in close, his mouth right on the shell of your ear. “Since you like watching me so much, how ‘bout we go home, and we can go the bathroom, and you can watch me break you off in the reflection of the mirror, yeah?” You grabbed his hand, nearly running back to Graceland, eager to see what he had in store for you.
Rio: You blinked, trying to test to see if you were dreaming. “R-Rio...” You gasped out. He stood in front of you, dressed in all black, a smirk on his lips. “Hey mama.” You jumped out of bed, but stopped yourself from running to him. He was dead. Rhea said he was dead. There hadn’t been a funeral, but she said he was dead and now... “I know,” he said, anticipating your thoughts, “I know. But, just look at me. Look at me. I’m here.” You looked at him; he had a beard now, and a nose ring, but it was him. He was real. He was here. “What...?” “It’s a long story, and I’ll tell you everything,” he answered your unasked question, “really, I shouldn’t even be here, but... I had to see you, baby. I had to see you.” You rushed towards him, burying your face in his chest as he held you. It had been months since you’d seen Rio, but it felt like a lifetime. You hadn’t really registered, until this moment, how much you had missed seeing him: his soft lips, his shorn hair and low lidded eyes. He was speaking to you, whispering that he was home now, and you pulled back to look at him. He looked different, harder, and you could see a change in him. “What happened to you?” You asked, your voice coming out in a whisper. “Remember the housewife?” “With the big boobs?” He chuckled, shaking his head at you fondly. “Yeah. She put three slugs in me,” he explained, and you looked him over, imagining the bullet wounds that you knew were under those dark clothes. “I’m good, mama. But I’m pissed,” he leaned down and kissed you, and your eyes fluttered shut as his lips moved against yours, “so you and me are gonna get justice.”
Bonus Boy
Chris Zapata: Baseball had never been your favorite sport. You’d found it boring and tedious. And then you started dating Chris and suddenly, you were standing up in the stands every week, screaming and cheering as he played. You sighed dreamily, your chin in your hand as you watched Zap on the field. He wasn’t really do much of anything--actually, he (and Maz, and Barone, and Vinny) were all watching Murray throw a fit in the outfield. But God, did Chris look good. It was getting late, and the sun was setting, and it seemed like the very last rays of the day were clinging to Chris’ skin, placing a halo around him. You could see from your spot in the stands the sweat glistening on his skin, could see his eyes widen as Murray threw his bat at the score board, and you sighed again. You couldn’t even be sure if the team was winning or not (Murray’s tantrum suggested they were not), all you knew was that Chris looked like an angel. Your heart stopped in your chest when Chris’ eyes met yours, and you watched a smirk grow on his lips. He knew you were watching him. He knew you couldn’t look away. The sight of him like this--in his element--made you weak. You couldn’t wait for the game to be over so you could inspect your man at a much closer angle.
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#bre's boys#bre's boys preference#billy russo x reader#logan delos x reader#jax teller x reader#coco cruz x reader#angel reyes x reader#miguel galindo x reader#nick amaro x reader#johnny tuturro x reader#rio x reader#chris zapata x reader
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sorry if this has been asked before, but what are your favorite quotes about (romantic) love?
• “I love you. I want us both to eat well.”
— Christopher Citro, from “Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled with Shriek”
• “You kiss the back of my legs and I want to cry. Only the sun has come this close, only the sun.”
— Shauna Barbosa, from “GPS”
• “August. We were arguing. You want love to be like this every day don’t you? 92 degrees even in the shade.”
“I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don’t expect to be happy. I don’t imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don’t think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is life-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies.”
“If love is going to be done differently I will have to do it. I don’t mean as a messiah-thing, I mean as a me-thing. I want to look into your eyes and not get blown up. I want you to see me as I am and not destroy me. I don’t want to retreat into plant life, or have the same bad dream every night. I don’t want to watch a city burn because I was there.”
— Jeanette Winterson
• “I’ll take care of you. / It’s rotten work. / Not to me. Not if it’s you.”
— from Anne Carson’s translation of Orestes
• “I think of you all the time and therefore have little to say that would not embarrass you, for instance my first feeling about the rain was that it was like you.”
— John Cage, from a letter to Merce Cunningham
• “I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.”
— Maggie Nelson, Bluets
• “I want to be a village full of sweethearts, / as you are, every second of the day, / cooking me soups & drawing me pictures / & holding me, my inexplicable & elephant sadness, / with your infinite arms. / But isn’t it true, you are not / always why I am happy. & I promise / it is true, you are almost never why, / why I am sad.”
— Chen Chen, from “Elegy for My Sadness”
• “Look here Vita—throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
“I always have such need to merely talk to you. Even when I have nothing to talk about – with you I just seem to go right ahead and sort of invent it. I invent it for you. Because I never seem to run out of tenderness for you and because I need to feel you near.”
“I could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm. A lighthouse in clean waters.”
“What can one say — except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting alone. Dearest — let me have a line… You have given me such happiness…”
— Virginia Woolf, from letters to Vita Sackville-West
• “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”
“Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude.”
— Vita Sackville-West, from letters to Virginia Woolf
• “Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there. So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own. I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.“
— Phoebe Waller-Bridge, in Fleabag
• “i carry your heart with me(i carry it inmy heart)”
— e.e. cummings, from “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]”
• “There was once a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her-immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. When I met Ana I knew: I loved her to the point of invention.”
— Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House
• “oh god it’s wonderful / to get out of bed / and drink too much coffee / and smoke too many cigarettes / and love you so much”
— Frank O’Hara, from “Steps”
• “This morning there’s snow everywhere. We remark on it. You tell me you didn’t sleep well. I say I didn’t either. You had a terrible night. “Me too.” We’re extraordinarily calm and tender with each other as if sensing the other’s rickety state of mind. As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don’t, of course. We never do. No matter. It’s the tenderness I care about. That’s the gift this morning that moves and holds me. Same as every morning.”
— Raymond Carver, from “The Gift”
• “Well Marianne, it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”
— Leonard Cohen, in a letter to Marianna Ihlen
• “I think about love on a scale from 1 to 10. Most of us find a 6 or a 7, and that’s why we have divorce. It’s the truth. We settle for that 6 or 7. But I like to think Kevin is Chiron’s 10. He’s found that and he realizes that there’s no reason to settle for a 6 or a 7 because, “I know this person is my 10. Whether or not this person believes I’m his 10, I’m going to devote my life to this person entirely.” That’s why the line where he says, “You’re the only man that’s ever touched me,” for me, was the most amazing, most beautiful thing I’ve seen in cinema, period. Because that’s what we strive for as people, to find that one person because they’re there. If Kevin doesn’t feel that they should be together, Chiron is just going to die a miserable person because that’s his person and he won’t settle for anything else.“
— Trevante Rhodes about Moonlight
• “I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world”
— Frank O’Hara, from “Having a Coke with You” but the whole poem is !
• “The door slammed and someone came home and low voices could be heard, the single lilt of a question as it rose, “How was it?” or “Are you hungry?” Something plain and necessary, yet extra, with care, a voice like those tiny roofs over the phone booths along the train tracks, the ones made from the same shingles used for houses, except only four rows wide—just enough to keep the phone dry. And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”
— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
• “I keep wishing for you, keep shutting up my eyes and looking toward the sky, asking with all my might for you, and yet you do not come. I thought of you, until the world grew rounder than it sometimes is, and I broke several dishes.”
— Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Minnie Holland
• “I don’t want you to be nervous. Maybe thinking of a walrus would help. Have you seen the video of the penguin accidentally stepping on a sleeping walrus? It thought it was a rock. The walrus wakes up like what the fuck and the penguin scurries off like oh shit. Sometimes it’s funny watching a surprise happen, and not just funny but kind of amazing — like, you never really know what’s what when it comes to this planet.
Then again, when it’s you getting surprised, that’s different. Especially for tender ones like us. What are we supposed to do? It’s bad for our hearts, you know. I hope you won’t need pills like I do. I think I get so scared because I’m greedy — I want to hold onto everything, the world wants to take it away. What the fuck. The number of hours we have together is actually not so large. Please linger near the door uncomfortably instead of just leaving. Please forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it.”
— Mikko Harvey, “For M”
• “Willem sleeps on the left side of the bed, and he on the right, and the first night they slept in the same bed, he turned to his right on his side, the way he always did, and Willem pressed up against him, tucking his right arm under his neck and then across his shoulders, and his left arm around his stomach, moving his legs between his legs. He was surprised by this, but once he overcame his initial discomfort, he found he liked it, that it was like being swaddled. One night in June, however, Willem didn’t do it, and he worried he had done something wrong. The next morning–early mornings were the other time they talked about the things that seemed too tender, too difficult, to be said in the daylight–he asked Willem if he was upset with him, and Willem, looking surprised, said no, of course not. “I just wondered,” he began, stammering, “because last night you didn’t–” But he couldn’t finish the sentence; he was too embarrassed. But then he could see Willem’s expression clear, and he rolled into him and wrapped his arms around him. “This?” he asked, and he nodded. “It was just because it was so hot last night, Willem said, and he waited for Willem to laugh at him, but he didn’t. “That’s the only reason, Judy.” Since then, Willem has held him in the same way every night, even through July, when not even the air-conditioning could erase the heaviness from the air, and when they both woke damp with sweat. This, he realizes, is what he wanted from a relationship all along. This is what he meant when he hoped he might someday be touched.”
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
• “No, I didn’t imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.”
— Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer
• “If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth, to this present time, I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours, I would.”
— David Wojnarowicz, The Half-Life
• “I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell, I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
— Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
• “If Moses had seen the way my friend’s face blushes when he’s drunk, and his beautiful curls and wonderful hands, he would not have written in his Torah: do not lie with a man”
— Rabbi Yehuda Al-Harizi/Judah Ben Solomon Harizi
• “I’ll rob the bank that gave you the impression that money is more fruitful than words, and I’ll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain. I’ll walk you to the hospital, I’ll wait in a white room that reeks of hand sanitizer and latex for the results from the MRI scan that tries to locate the malady that keeps your mind guessing, and I want to write you a poem every day until my hand breaks and assure you that you’ll find your place, it’s just the world has a funny way of hiding spots fertile enough for bodies like yours to grow roots. I hope our ghosts aren’t eating you alive. If i’m to speak for myself, I’ll tell you that the universe is twice as big as we think it is and you’re the only one that made that idea less devastating.”
— Lucas Regazzi, from “Small”
• “I thought she was sleeping until I heard her call out from across the room, “Will you bring me a glass of water?” I did. Then in her always-sleepy tone and drawl she said, “Do you remember when you were a little girl and you would ask your mama to bring you a glass of water?” Yeah. “You know how half the time you weren’t even thirsty. You just wanted that hand that was attached to that glass that was attached to that person you just wanted to stay there until you fell asleep.” She took the glass of water that I brought her and just sat it down full on the table next to her. Wow, I thought. What am I gonna do with love like this.”
— Dito Montiel, One Night
#this is the best ask i've ever received actually thank you so much#w#compilation#the earth was made for lovers#shauna barbosa#jeanette winterson#madeline miller#franz kafka#hanya yanagihara#emily dickinson#ocean vuong#maggie nelson#chen chen#virginia woolf#vita sackville west#david wojnarowicz#frank o’hara
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April 5, 2021: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) (Recap: Part One)
Yeah, so...Spectrum exploded last night.
So, I'm unfortunately a little behind. BUT NEVER FEAR! I'll get back on time before you know it! So, uh...where were we last time? OH RIGHT! Let's talk about black comedy. And I don't mean black-and-white comedies, or comedies prominently featuring African-American culture and demographic. No, I mean dark comedies.
The "black comedy" functions off of macabre or taboo humor and jokes, and is often closely associated with biting satire and commentary in film. That definition is loose as hell, I know, but it's all about the subject matter. The most common subject matter for dark humor is death, of course, and related subjects to death. War, murder, strife, madness, and violence are also common topics here.
Some of the best comedies are black comedies, though. For example, Brazil (1985; dir. Terry Gilliam) focuses on themes of depression, dreams, terrorism, totalitarian governments, and madness. And it's GREAT. How about The Death of Stalin (2018; dir. Armando Iannucci)? The title ALONE should tell you everything you need to know about the tone and topic, AND YET...
It's HILARIOUS. And also informative! If you haven't seen it, I definitely recommend it. And again, that film is about, well...the death of Stalin, and the fallout of his disastrous and murderous regime. Dark, DARK topic, but very funny movie.
Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is about war; Fargo is about murder in North Dakota; Heathers is about a toxic relationship and the death and murder of teenagers; Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance is about an actor's existential crisis and complete mental breakdown; and Trainspotting is about the devastating effects of drug addiction and features a DEAD BABY FOR CHRIST'S SAKE...and yet they're all full of laughs! Except for the baby scene. Fuck me, the baby scene in Trainspotting.
So, yeah, these are a diverse group of films, that's for sure. But where does it all start? There's 1942's To Be or Not to Be (dir. Ernst Lubitsch), which is about a Polish theatre company who need to escape in the midst of...well, 1942 Poland. If you don't get why that's dark, you should probably look up some history, bud. Charlie Chaplin would dip into the role in 1947's Monsieur Verdoux, which I mentioned last time. And there's the seldom-talked-about Kind Hearts and Coronets (dir. Robert Hamer), a 1949 film about murder for status, essentially.
But it's hard to argue that the most prominent early black comedy is 1944's Cary Grant vehicle, Arsenic and Old Lace.
Directed by Frank Capra, this film was based on a 1941 stage play, and is about...well, we'll get to it. While its prominence as a black comedy is one reason I'm watching this movie, the other is...well, to be honest, this is a movie I heard about CONSTANTLY from my Mom, as this is one of her favorites. And yet, like Dirty Dancing, I've somehow never seen it! Let's remedy that.
So, without further ado, let's get into it! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
Recap (1/2)
The film starts off with a BANG, as a man calls me a “big simp” to my face! Actually, he’s screaming at a Brooklyn Dodgers game, where a massive fight breaks out. This fight quickly transitions to a city hall, where a line of people are waiting to file marriage licenses. Amongst the line is Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) and Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane).
Brewster is hiding from the press, as he’s a famous reviewer, and author of the Bachelor’s Bible, and it would be quite the scandal for him to get married. And yet, he’s head over heels in love with Elaine. After going through an existential crisis about the whole thing, he gives into Elaine’s sweet demeanor, and the two file their marriage license officially.
It’s Halloween day, and we move from the city to the suburbs of Brooklyn, where two policemen, O’Hara (Jack Carson) and Sanders (John RIdgely) are on patrol. Sanders tells O’Hara of the kindly Brewster Sisters, the sweetest women on Earth, both of whom live in the neighborhood. Currently, they are being visited by Reverend Harper (Grant Mitchell), Elaine’s father. He’s speaking with Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha Brewster (Jean Adair), the kindly aunts of Mortimer.
Also living there is Mortimer’s brother Teddy Brewster (John Alexander), who apparently believes that he’s Teddy Roosevelt, which is...hilarious. Dude is hilarious, seriously. The cops come over to visit the two, and collect some clothes and toys for local charity. Also, Teddy only leaves a room by screaming “CHAAAAARGE!!!”, and running up the stairs, and I love Teddy a lot.
Reverend Harper and the cops leave for the night, and the sisters settle down for the evening. Abby and Martha state that their plans for Elaine and Mortimer should go as scheduled, which is probably talking about their marriage. Abby also mentions that she’s done something while she was away, to Martha’s delight and surprise. They tell Teddy that he’ll soon be digging a new lock for the Panama Canal...whatever that means.
Martha’s about to go to the basement to see what Abby’s done, but she states that because she was all by herself, the surprise is in the window seat. As she’s about to look at the surprise, Elaine shows up in the window, and the two arrive to give the happy news that they’re married. Elaine goes to tell her father of the news, while Mortimer goes to tell his sweet aunts. Afterwards, the two will be on their honeymoon, going to Niagara Falls. And I should say, they’re quite a sweet couple.
After telling the news to his aunts, he asks them where his notes are for his new controversial book, Mind Over Matrimony. They go to look for it around the house, and Teddy comes downstairs, dressed up in attire to “go to Panama.” Aunt Abby comes across a childhood picture of Jonathan, Mortimer’s brother and apparently a violent sociopath or some sort. She goes to burn the picture (geez), and Mortimer continues to look for the notes. He goes to the window seat.
Yup! It’s a body! Looks like Abby and Martha’s sweet old lady act is a guise for some myurder! Which I know, just because it’s the most famous thing about the movie. However, Mortimer thinks the murderer is Teddy, and tells his sweet old aunts about the body, asking that he gets put into an asylum. But Abby notes that Teddy didn’t kill the man, and they already know about the body!
Which, yeah, surprises Mortimer, obviously.
Abby cheerfully admits that the man, Mr. Hoskins, was poisoned by a tainted glass of elderberry wine, and that they did so on purpose, hiding the body before the Reverend came for a visit. The whole thing isn’t a big deal; it’s just Abby and Martha’s little secret!
After they leave, and brush off the whole thing as easy as needlepoint or macramé as a hobby, Mortimer, is completely broken by the whole affair, and is partially convinced that he’s dreaming. All the while, Elaine’s trying to get Mortimer to come over and speak with her father. But Mortimer can’t exactly forget about this whole silly murder thing, and goes to confront his aunts about it. He learns that Teddy’s digging not a lock, but a grave in the cellar. As he’s done with 10 other bodies. Or maybe it’s 11 others?
After picking up a phone call from Elaine, then hanging up abruptly (and understandably), Mortimer finds out how this whole thing started. See, the two have a “Renters Wanted” sign in their front lawn, and the neighborhood thinks that it’s there so the two sweet old ladies can offer help to anyone in need, even though they aren’t actually renting to anyone. In reality...well, they do it for another reason.
See, an older gentleman stopped by a bit ago, and he had a heart attack right there in the living room. After seeing how peaceful he looked, the two decided to bring in other lonely old men and bring in the same kind of peace. And from there...well, yeah, you get the general idea. They’ve been poisoning them with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide mixed in with elderberry wine. Apparently, Martha’s got the mixture just right so that it tastes delicious. With all this explained, they offer Mortimer a sip of wine. Which he’s understandably nervous about.
But with all of that done, Elaine comes over to check in on him. But he’s not able to tell her anything, which greatly (and understandably) confuses her. He basically kicks her out (which enrages her, once again understandably), and calls a judge with the intent to frame the whole affair on Teddy, who’s always been.unstable. Which, for the record, is not even SLIGHTLY going to solve the problem.
But as he’s on the phone, a man named Gibbs (Edward McWade) comes in to rent an apartment. He’s all alone in the world, with nobody to care for him. And of course, this leads to the women trying to poison him with the wine. It’s a funny yet tense moment as he stops just short of drinking the wine, distracted by Mortimer’s freakout over the phone. But Mortimer gets off the phone JUST in time to scare Gibbs away and stop him from drinking the wine. And it is...VERY funny, goddamn.
As Mortimer tries to tell the aunts exactly what’s wrong with what they’re doing, the phone rings. It’s a call from Witherspoon (Edward Everett Horton), who runs an asylum that Mortimer wants Teddy committed into. However, they don’t quite have room for him, as they have too many Theodore Roosevelts at present. However, they do need more Napoleon Bonapartes. I love this goddamn movie.
Still, Witherspoon agrees to take him in despite that, and Mortimer head out to get the paperwork done. However, he asks his aunts to not do anything until he gets back, and he also proises that he’ll attend the “services” for their latest victim. He leaves, and kinda steals a cabbie’s car in the process (I love this movie, I’m telling you), and Abby and Martha start shutting things down for the night. However, as they do, they get a mysterious knock on the door. They pretend not to be home...only for a man with an ominous scar to enter the room regardless.
Let’s pause here, shall we? See you in Part 2!
#arsenic and old lace#frank capra#joseph kesselring#cary grant#priscilla lane#raymond massey#jack carson#peter lorre#jean adait#josephine hull#john alexander#john ridgely#userveil#johnsonshildy#userkeanu#usersasha#user365#comedy april#365days365movies#365 movie challenge#365 movies 365 days#365 Days 365 Movies#365 movies a year
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My Favorite Films and Performances of 2020
“I wish I could’ve seen it on the big screen.”
It was a strange year, and even stranger year of movie watching. In 2020 I saw only one of my top films in a theater, which is crazy (like much else over these past months). But the experience of keeping up with the movies this year was a reminder that great filmmaking can transcend the specifics of the viewing experience. In your living room, in bed, projected onto the side of a garage, streaming on Twitch, broken up into multiple sittings, maybe even on your phone (desperate times)… if doesn’t matter as long as it connects with you. A great film has the power to soothe and transport, to alter your perspective, to re-wire your brain. So while I didn’t get on a single airplane last year, I definitely went places. And I’m grateful for these changes of scenery. For the time-travel as well; last year in my house, we found great comfort in revisiting a bunch of old favorites. It was also an opportunity to finally watch a number of those older films that had someone evaded us… a year of catching up, now or never. We were members of a weekly movie club for some months — that was cool. Another pleasant silver lining was the emergence of virtual film festivals, which have been a fantastic opportunity. I hope that they can continue in some form when this pandemic is in the rearview. Because, you know, getting to Park City is a real schlep. All this to say: like you, I’ll always remember 2020. In this truly crummy year, the movies really helped.
I’m including some of the film festival stuff that’s coming out a little later, because the boundaries between 2020 films and 2021 films feels blurry to me without proper theatrical releases.
TOP 5, loosely ranked. I love these deeply.
1. LOVERS ROCK, Steve McQueen
2. NOMADLAND, Chloe Zhao
3. ANOTHER ROUND, Thomas Vinterberg
4. TIME, Garrett Bradley
5. MARTIN EDEN, Pietro Marcello
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The rest of the Top 25, in alphabetical order. I loved these.
À L’ABORDAGE, Guillaume Brac
BACURAU, Kleber Mendonça Filho
COLOR OUT OF SPACE, Richard Stanley
THE FATHER, Florian Zeller
FIRST COW, Kelly Reichardt
I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS, Charlie Kaufman
JASPER MALL, Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb
LUXOR, Zeina Durra
ALEX WHEATLE / EDUCATION / MANGROVE / RED, WHITE AND BLUE, Steve McQueen
THE NEST, Sean Durkin
NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, Eliza Hittman
NEW ORDER, Michel Franco
THE PAINTER & THE THIEF, Benjamin Ree
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD, Armando Iannucci
POSSESSOR, Brandon Cronenberg
PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, Emerald Fennell
RELIC, Natalie Erika James
SAINT FRANCES, Alex Thompson
SOUND OF METAL, Darius Marder
THE TRUTH, Hirokazu Koreeda
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I also enjoyed (some more than others):
Apples, The Assistant, Babyteeth, Bad Education, Black Bear, Blow the Man Down, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Butt Boy, The Climb, Da 5 Bloods, Deerskin, Emma, The Father (Bulgaria), Greed, His House, The Hunt, I Used to Go Here, I'm No Longer Here, Impetigore, The Intruder, The Invisible Man, Kajillionaire, La Llorona, Let Them All Talk, Lost Girls, The Man Who Sold His Skin, Mank, Never Gonna Snow Again, News of the World, One Night in Miami, Palm Springs, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Rebecca, She Dies Tomorrow, Shirley, Slow Machine, Sorry We Missed You, Soul, Spree, Straight Up, A Sun, Swallow, Tenet, Tesla, Tommaso, The Traitor, The Trip to Greece, True History of the Kelly Gang, Uncle Frank, Under the Open Sky, The Vast of Night, Vitalina Varela, Wendy, The Whistlers, Wildland, Young Ahmed
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And these documentaries!
American Murder: The Family Next Door, The American Sector, Assassins, Beastie Boys Story, The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, Boys State, Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero, Circus of Books, Class Action Park, Collective, Crip Camp, David Byrne's American Utopia, Dick Johnson is Dead, Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds, The Go-Go's, Gunda, Miss Americana, MLK/FBI, The Mole Agent, Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend of Walter Mercado, My Psychedelic Love Story, Mystify: Michael Hutchence, Narrowsburg, On the Record, Other Music, Sisters with Transistors, Spaceship Earth, The Way I See It, Whirlybird
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And these shorts:
Bye Bye Body (which I edited), Fit Model, Friday Night Pizza for Daddy, Hard Cracked the Wind, The Human Voice, John Was Trying to Contact Aliens, Michael's Preference West, What Did Jack Do?, World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime
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My favorite performance of the year:
Frances McDormand as Fern in Nomadland
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Favorite ensembles:
À l’abordage, Another Round, Bad Education, Babyteeth, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, Blow the Man Down, Emma, First Cow, Kajillionaire, Let Them All Talk, Lovers Rock, Mangrove, Mank, One Night in Miami, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Promising Young Woman, True History of the Kelly Gang
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More memorable (and in some cases under-discussed) performances:
Christopher Abbott as Colin Tate in Possessor and as Gabe in Black Bear
Idir Ben Addi as Ahmed in Young Ahmed
Riz Ahmed as Ruben Stone in Sound of Metal
Daniel Algrant as Kelvin Kranz in Let Them All Talk
Maria Bakalova as Tutar Sagdiyev in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Haley Bennett as Hunter Conrad in Swallow
John Boyega as Leroy Logan in Red, White and Blue
Rob Brydon as Rob Brydon in The Trip to Greece
Jessie Buckley as Young Woman in I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Nicolas Cage as Nathan Gardner in Color Out of Space
Salif Cissé as Chérif in À L’abordage
Sheyi Cole as Alex Wheatle in Alex Wheatle
Cleopatra Coleman as Trina in The Argument
Carrie Coon as Allison O’Hara in The Nest
Michael Angelo Covino as Mike in The Climb
Willem Dafoe as Tommaso in Tommaso
Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst in Mank
Catherine Deneuve as Fabienne Dangeville in The Truth
Katie Findlay as Rory in Straight Up
Sidney Flanigan as Autumn in Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Johnny Flynn as George Knightley in Emma
Julia Garner as Jane in The Assistant
Robbie Gee as Simeon in Alex Wheatle
Chris Giarmo as himself in David Byrne’s American Utopia
Betty Gilpin as Crystal Creasey in The Hunt
Ethan Hawke as Hank in The Truth
Kris Hitchen as Ricky Turner in Sorry We Missed You
Anthony Hopkins as Anthony in The Father
Jonathan Jules as Dennis Isaacs in Alex Wheatle
Sandra Guldberg Kampp as Ida in Wildland
Joe Keery as Kurt Knuckle in Spree
Udo Kier as Michael in Bacurau
Orion Lee as King Lu in First Cow
Delroy Lindo as Paul in Da 5 Bloods
Peter Macdissi as Walid "Wally" Nadeem in Uncle Frank
Matthew Macfadyen as Wilcock in The Assistant
George MacKay as Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang
Yahya Mahayni as Sam Ali in The Man Who Sold His Skin
Luca Marinelli as Martin Eden in Martin Eden
Tuppence Middleton as Sara Mankiewicz in Mank
Mads Mikkelsen as Martin in Another Round
Wunmi Mosaku as Rial in His House
Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia Kass in The Invisible Man
Kelly O'Sullivan as Bridget in Saint Frances
Shaun Parkes as Frank Crichlow in Mangrove
Robert Pattinson as Neil in Tenet
Paul Raci as Joe in Sound of Metal
Kadeem Ramsay as Samson in Lovers Rock
Gayle Rankin as Marissa in The Climb
Tanya Reynolds as Mrs Augusta Elton in Emma
Tyler Rice as Detective Russell Fox in Butt Boy
Andrea Riseborough as Hana in Luxor
Cecilia Roth as Marta in The Intruder
William Sadler as the Grim Reaper in Bill & Ted Face the Music
Kenyah Sandy as Kingsley Smith in Education
Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn as Martha Trenton in Lovers Rock
David Strathairn as David in Nomadland
Michael Stuhlbarg as Stanley Edgar Hyman in Shirley
Swankie as Swankie in Nomadland
Tilda Swinton as Woman in The Human Voice
Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca
Steve Toussaint as Ken Logan in Red, White and Blue
Alec Utgoff as Zhenia in Never Gonna Snow Again
Jairaj Varsani as young David Copperfield in The Personal History of David Copperfield
Ben Whishaw as Uriah Heep in The Personal History of David Copperfield
Sharlene Whyte as Agnes Smith in Education
Letitia Wright as Altheia Jones-LeCointe in Mangrove
Ramona Edith Williams as Frances in Saint Frances
Kôji Yakusho as Masao Mikami in Under the Open Sky
Youn Yuh-jung as Soon-ja in Minari
Helena Zengel as Johanna Leonberger in News of the World
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Favorite pre-2020 films I saw for the first time in 2020:
Blood on the Moon, But I’m A Cheerleader, Crooklyn, Cure, Daughters of the Dust, The Death of Dick Long, Deep Cover, The Draughtsman's Contract, Eyes of Laura Mars, Give Me Liberty, Greener Grass, Hardcore, High Hopes, The Last Party, Long Day's Journey into Night, Maiden, One Day Pina Asked, Persona, Right Now Wrong Then, Right On!, The Seventh Victim, Slightly French, Synonyms, Tammy and the T-Rex, Variety, The Watermelon Woman... and a tip of the hat to Coppola's new The Godfather Part III recut, The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
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