Day 55:

When you first slice there’s a sting, and soon, when you catch sight of the blood, your heart starts racing and pounding because you’ve gotten away with something you know you shouldn’t be doing. Then you go into a sort of hypnotic state, because you’re in total awe watching that bright red line puddle up on your skin, watching it run down your arm like a waterfall. And then comes the sweet release, although it only lasts for a few moments. That sweet release comes with the second and third cut, before you start to try to hold off as long as you can before you draw the razor again across your skin. It doesn’t even hurt anymore by the fourth; it has merely become a chance to finally let go. Or maybe it does hurt a little, but you don’t notice the pain because it hurts way less than everything else, and besides, it’s the only thing you can manage to do right.

Oh literature...

“It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap dug during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word ‘castle’, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away in the green shade…”

—	Ian McEwan, Atonement, Page 35

Everything whimsical has left.

I live at the end of a 5 and 1/2 minute hallway
But as far as I can see you are still miles from me
In your doorway

And oh by the way
When the landlord came today
He measured everything
I knew he'd get it wrong
But I just played along
Cause I was hoping that he would fix it all

Inside your door
But there's more to this story
Than I've been letting on
There are words made of letters
Unwritten
And yes I forgive you
For leading me on

You can think of it like this
When you can't resist
I'm in your hallway standing on a cliff
And just when I think I've found the trick
I'm tumbling
Like an echo

'Cause there's only so far I can go
When you're living in a hallway that keeps growing
I think to myself
30 seconds and I'll be there 

Black Widow

“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.”

—	Tennessee Williams

“I thought about all the things that everyone ever says to each other, and how everyone is going to die, whether it’s in a millisecond, or days, or months, or 76.5 years, if you were just born. Everything that’s born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they’re all on fire, and we’re all trapped.”

—	Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I've discovered Tumblr....may the Gods be merciful.

“I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.”

—	Virginia Woolf (The Mark on the Wall)

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t rest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

—	Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

“There are only two worlds - your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.”

—	Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic

An optimist? A pessimist? Neither. A fool.

Like driving along a bumpy road and losing control of the steering wheel, tossing you -- just a tad -- off the road. The wheels kick up some dirt, but you're able to pull it back. Yet no matter how tightly you grip the wheel, no matter how hard you try to drive straight, something keeps jerking you to the side. You have so little control over anything anymore. And at some point, the struggle becomes too much -- too tiring -- and you consider letting go. Allowing tragedy...or whatever...to happen.