Ready, Fire, Aim.

Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, it first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.

b99 hiatus meme ¬ week one: favourite male friendship

Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way.

concept: every word that’s thought about you appears on your skin like a tattoo. there’s your best friend, aromantic and proud of it, the kindest person you’ve ever met. she knows everybody in your grade by name and she has more friends than anyone you know. she won’t ever wear shorts because she’s embarrassed of showing her legs where she’s covered in compliments, proof that she is loved a thousand times over. there’s the boy who loves reading and drawing and other boys. he comes to school with sharpied artwork all over his skin to cover up the words that scream QUEER over and over and over. he holds himself tall and smiles at everyone and when people see him, they think masterpiece before they think gay. there’s the most popular girl in high school, four-time homecoming queen, who harbors a secret love for math. at lunch her friend wrinkles his nose at her calculus homework - “damn, you’re such a nerd.” she laughs it off and every time her heart breaks a little. NICE and PRETTY dot her skin like freckles, but she’d burn all of them off just for one SMART. there’s the boy you sit behind in english class with soft eyes and a tragic smile. one day his sleeves slip back and you see JUST KILL YOURSELF ALREADY snaking across his arm and between the slits on his wrist. so for a week you concentrate on the same thought, and on friday you finally see the product of your labor: YOU ARE LOVED YOU ARE LOVED all across his hand and crowding out the words on his wrist. he touches it every few minutes, gently, like he can’t believe it’s really there, and you smile so hard you almost cry. and there’s you, with a patchwork of compliments intertwined with the insults: your hipbones read FAT and your ankles read I WISH I WERE YOUR FRIEND. some nights you spend hours in front of the mirror, fingers tracing over the constellations patterned across your skin, wondering which words came from whom. sometimes you find an extra I LOVE YOU tucked into the curve of your elbow and you’re ecstatic, but when it fades away days later you feel like you’ve lost something. most of the words come and go, but always, over your heart, there’s this: YOU WILL MAKE IT. and on the bad days when all you want is to fall onto your bed and cry your eyes out and never get back up, you look in the mirror instead and think, you will make it. you will make it, i swear. you will.