I shall think of you at sunset, and at sunrise, again; and at noon, and forenoon, and afternoon, and always, and evermore, till this little heart stops beating and is still.
Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Susan Huntington Dickinson, from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson
“People ask me, “Have you tried yoga? Kombucha? This special water?” And I don’t have the energy to explain that yes, I’ve tried them. I’ve tried crystals and healing drum circles and prayer and everything. What I want to try is acceptance. I want to see what happens if I can simply accept myself for who I am: battered, broken, hoping for relief, still enduring somehow. I will still take a cure if it’s presented to me, but I am so tired of trying to bargain with the universe for some kind of cure. The price is simply too high to live chasing cures, because in doing so, I’m missing living my life. I know only that in chasing to achieve the person I once was, I will miss the person I have become.”
Alice Wong “Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters
Text ID: I’ve never seen you without wanting to pray to you. I’ve never heard you without wanting to place my faith in you. I’ve never longed for you without wanting to suffer for your sake. I’ve never desired you without wanting to be able to kneel before you.
try calling it hibernation. Imagine the darkness is a cave in which you will be nurtured by doing absolutely nothing. Hibernating animals don’t even dream. It’s okay if you can’t imagine Spring. Sleep through the alarm of the world. Name your hopelessness a quiet hollow, a place you go to heal, a den you dug, Sweetheart, instead of a grave.
“He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being.”
I do not want / to inspire pity so much as revulsion, I want people to despair / like I despaired when I couldn’t run, could barely walk, each stair / a newly unwrapped razor against muscle -> Actually we should say that Cassandra screams outside of language. The scream is to gash the fabric of normal life, to rend it into strange tatters. -> Right here this pain this cut this chill this bruise this pull this fracture this shiver this ache this strain this stinging this burn this scar this fever this tremble this split this blister this lump this weep this pounding this crack this scrape this chip this sprain this flutter this stitch this rasp this damage this flush this break this swell this catch this murmur this weakness this failure this tremor this clot right here I feel it. I speak it. -> Scream when your life is threatened. Form a noise so true that your tormentor recognizes it as a voice that lives in his own throat. -> Once, when I was in a glut of pain, / I said to a friend, / Just take an hour and imagine / this is happening to you. / She looked straight ahead / and said, I don’t want to.
Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-1927; August 1st, 1926
Text ID: Courage, be everything to yourself. Seek your truth; construct your life, a beautiful life; be strong and passionately cherish yourself to console yourself for being so alone in the midst of all those who love you.
[text ID: Where does all that gentleness / & beauty & brilliance go? / She said: It does not go. / I pressed the sentence to my chest like / horse’s hair. I lived in it.]
