Dead Poets Society (1989)

About a hundred ships are sailing away before me, their masts billowing in the wind as if beckoning me to catch up. Each will take me to a wonderful future, each promising a destination lovelier than where I am now. One an English Professor very much like John Keating, one a traveler who takes good photos and writes about the places she had been, one a published writer living in a cottage near the mountains and the sea, one living in Switzerland with plants and dogs, one married and a mother to two kids, one who owns a quaint bookshop café in a remote but picturesque countryside, even chances for broken dreams, and many more promises I couldn’t quite make out; each ship sending glimpses of stopovers, mistakes, places I’ll never see, and lives I’ll never get to live― a cruel reminder than I am stuck in one body while I long ardently and achingly for more.

Every single moment of everyday I stand on this shore and the same ships are there, ever so slow but still advancing further away from me. And here I am who refuses to choose. Life is a current and I am a child of the waves. At the end of the day, no matter how far I venture, my wild will always come back to the gentleness of the shores. I stay while the others let go. There are times I can hear the calls of the grown-ups downstream telling me that everything will be all right, that I should let myself be taken away, because there is no growth in staying. But this stubborn heart of a dreamer has a different idea of growth. I want to plant myself in this place and let my roots pierce the deepest earth, letting their thick bodies crawl back in the past and alongside with the present. That way I wouldn’t cling to the superficial, that way I could drench myself with the beauty of what we were, that way I can move on without leaving behind the yesterdays I found comfort in. I hate how the world spins these days. I have always believed that I’m an old soul born in the wrong era. But I am here without a choice but to live nonetheless, and ignore the fact that that is precisely the core of my undying internal struggle.

In the shore I stand unmoving, my shadow as faint as the last breath of a dying star, the heat of the sun slowly corroding my skin into sands, and the salty breeze carries them away to my little graves. And it pains me deeply because I know. I know that sooner or later I have to board one of the ships, abandoning the others behind.

The little girl in me knows the world is too cruel for dreamers.

― autumn artemis│An Old Soul, Her Dreams, and Her Tragedy

‘so maybe i wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation’

‘take a body, maybe / your own, dump it gently. all your dead / unfinished selves and dump them gently’

‘i think i’d rather keep the bullet this time. it’s mine, you can’t have it, see, im not giving it up’

‘when you bang your head on the wall you have to remember / you’re on both sides of it already but go ahead, / yell at yourself’

‘a man takes his sadness down the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river’

‘tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns / of snow and im staring at you like ‘im looking through the window, counting birds’

‘i had to make up all the words myself. the way / they taste, the way they sound in the air’

‘please keep him safe. / let him lay his head on my chest and we will be / like sailors, swimming in the sound of / it, dashed / to pieces’

‘i’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me’

‘i ran and i knew you wouldn’t catch me. / you are a fever i am learning to live with, and everything is happening at the wrong end of a very long tunnel’

‘i clawed my way into the light but the light is just as scary. id rather quit. id rather be sad. it’s too much work.’

‘someone once told me that explaining is an admission of failure. im sure you remember, i was on the phone with you, sweetheart’

‘and the tug of a simple / profound sadness when it sounds so far away’

‘here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed’

I take off my hands and I give them to you but you don't want them, so I take them back and put them on the wrong way, the wrong wrists.

I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.

His hands keep turning into birds, and his hands keep flying away from him. Eventually the birds must land.

We can do anything. It’s not because our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we struggle with.

Leave a trail of letters like those little knots of bread we used to dream about.

We have not touched the stars, nor are we forgiven, which brings us back to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.

You were burned, you were about to burn, you're still on fire.