WE ARE ENDLESSLY BOUND BY LOVE

define hole / is a hole a real thing? / Marco Poloni, Black Hole, from The Majorana Experiment, 2010 / Flatfields Fotografien / What We Talk About When We Talk About Holes / Dark (2017-2020) / post / Disco Elysium / Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) / Donnie Darko (2001) / Kaveh Akbar, from “The Miracle,” Pilgrim Bell / post / Weizmann Institute of Science / Mathworld / post / post / post / post / Anne Boyer, from “Woman Sitting at the Machine,” in A Handbook of Disappointed Fate / Dennis Patrick Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh / The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio, 1601–1602 (detail) / The Incredulity of St. Thomas, Bernardo Strozzi, 1582-1644 (detail) / Don McKay, from “Twinflower,” Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay, intro. Méira Cook (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006) / thierryetherve / Pathologic / post / Gregory Orr, from How Beautiful the Beloved / Tomas Tranströmer, tr. by Robert Bly, from a poem titled “Track,” / Disco Elysium / Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost / Pathologic 2 / Disco Elysium / Carl Phillips, from “Givingly”, Wild is the Wind / post / Pathologic / The Juniper Tree (Nietzchka Keene | 1990) / John Banville, Eclipse / Twin Peaks / Disco Elysium / VectorStock / True Detective / Night in the Woods

HAND ON MY HEART. HAND ON MY STUPID HEART

you will love deeper, you will love kinder, you will love more (in spades, in large swatches of caution tape, free and unbidden; the numb finally slushing away)

but you will still sit on the floor of your apartment and feel heinous little snatches of your mental illness. you will unwind over small things. you will desperately want some-kind-of-validation, but know there's actually-something-else-here, a thirst unable to be slaked, a hunger that causes you to rip open the world so it understand your pain. you'll think about how you want to leave before you get left, how the hurt will be so manageable if you just steal out the back door and run with your bare feet. you will call it a controlled detonation, your tongue dry while you plan relocating to the city.

but you will exit the car fire of your childhood and you will hold the child you didn't get to be and you'll say: shush now. we won't run, we know how to make our home.

and the child will say: it's all sand. there's no foundation. the world isn't safe to build upon.

and we will stretch our hands and our old back and the hips that keep clicking. and we will say: from sand we made glass. and what else is there to say after that? the world isn't safe. the world isn't always kind.

― The Haunting of Hill House (2018) dir. Mike Flanagan 

“There are things that tie them to a place, very much like they do us. Some remain tethered to a patch of land. A time and date. The spilling of blood. A terrible crime. But there are others. Others that hold onto an emotion. A drive. Loss. Revenge. Or love. Those, they never go away.” 

― Crimson Peak (2015) dir. Guillermo del Toro

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”

― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“What is a ghost, after all, but a repressed memory, the past demanding to be heard in the present?” 

― Alfred Mac Adam, Introduction of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

“If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that house.” 

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 

“May you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you — haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe — I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 

“Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream”

― Euripides, Herakles 

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.”

― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls 

“In real life it’s the living who haunt you.”

— Franz Wright, from section 1 of “Observations,” Earlier Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

“Perhaps I haunted her as she haunted me”

— Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca 

“They were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. What can’t be.”

― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“And how odd it is to be haunted by someone who is still alive.”

― I Guess the Old You is a Ghost (#589: June 25, 2014)

“You’ll always be my favourite ghost”

― Big God, Florence + the Machine

“I’m begging you to keep on hunting me” 

― Haunting, Halsey

“I’ll come back to haunt you”