eli

cruel and unusual that in order to do something you have to begin

was anyone going to tell me that after beginning you then have to continue as well

i love a long morning stretch and a filling breakfast. i love the bitter taste of coffee swirled with sweet oat milk signaling to my taste buds that it’s time to wake up. my mouth is still warm with the flavors of breakfast — thick sliced bread, some good butter, fresh spinach, sweet onion, salsa roja, vegan scramble, fresh cilantro. sometimes i cannot believe how blessed we are to taste, to touch, to feel. i hear birds singing in the sweating plum tree, i hear a radio playing a few houses over — joyful and welcoming. it’s in these moments that i want to melt inside — the ones that are inexplicably good and slow and safe. if we can learn nourishment in these moments we can grow and nourish each other, we can keep building a world of safe and full and home.

when it’s super hot outside and suddenly you feel the wind on your skin and it’s as fresh as an early spring morning you feel like you've been reborn

i want to crawl on you like. Bugs

One time a friend told me that if she wanted to have a chill night she would come to me and ask for tea and a book to read. I didn’t like tea at the time, but I always made sure my cupboards had them in case she needed a quiet night. One time I told my boss that I loved oranges, but couldn’t peel them because of my nails. For a year he made sure to peel me one at least once a week. Once my friends gave me a made up superlative of “most likely to have a pen they could borrow” and ever since I’ve made sure I always carry a pen with me. A long time ago, my high school librarian told me that no one would care what my grade in my sophomore chemistry class was if I’m bringing them doughnuts and asking them about their day.

Sometimes friendship is about carrying pens and peeling oranges. But the point is, surrounding yourself with people who you want to do the little things for. The point of it all is bringing in the doughnuts because you’ve found the people who deserve the doughnuts.

And I’m so fucking lucky, and I don’t always say it or even think it. Because I have friends who send me letters and who told me when the cafeteria at work had chopped tomatoes and who want to watch Scream with me and it just hits me sometimes that this world can do the ugliest things to people, but as long as I still have a friend who will point out dogs on the sidewalks to me then I have something amazing to live for. And as long as I have pals who I want to make peppermint bark for, then I have a reason to keep pushing this world to be better.

“Extreme” but everyone knows one where it’s happened. My grandmother had breast cancer and one of the other women there came in one day upset because her husband was leaving her over the mastectomy.

actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it

Identity has become the axis of so much university activism because, for all the radical posturing associated with it, identity politics does not threaten the established order of society. It promotes a moralistic and self-indulgent anti-politics, where a person’s use of language and the purity of their thinking matters more than confronting collectively the material conditions and social relations under which they are forced to live. It creates a simulation of political struggle - one that doesn’t merely fail to challenge the material inequality and unfreedom of late capitalism, but fundamentally aligns with the dynamics and interests of its atomised, spectacle-driven society. It is a perfect mirror of consumerism, playing-upon the individual’s desires for real freedom, only to perpetuate and prettify the conditions of their alienation.

i don’t think people understand how much of life is grief. not just people dying, but losing the version of yourself you thought you’d become. grieving the city you had to leave. the friends you lost not in argument, but in silence. the summer that will never come back. the feeling that maybe you peaked at 12 when you were reading books under the covers and believing in forever

But the thing I will never admit to anyone who's met me is how desperately I want to be loved, I don't think I could say it. How I want someone to hold my wrists and kiss my palms and smile at me, and want me, I want to be wanted and I don't know how long poetry or songs will substitute for being wanted.

i keep thinking about this: maybe love isn’t a destination or a possession but an influence. a force that changes your shape. that helps you become. and when it’s gone, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost it. it means you’ve absorbed it. the people who leave don’t take it with them. they leave it behind in you.

love is about transforming. about leaving someone better than you found them, even if you had to leave. and i hope i’ve done that. i hope somewhere, someone is still listening to a song i showed them. still laughing at something i said. still drinking their coffee the way i do. we don’t belong to each other but we do belong to the versions of ourselves we became in each other’s presence and in that way, we never truly lose anyone.