#celestialfemlock

You learn several things that day. Step I: Start with a strip of paper, about 11 inches long. The first is that there is something painful about paper in your best friend’s hands. The way she bends and folds. Her fingers moving, delicate. The nearly inaudible crackle of a creased, college-ruled page. It makes you wistful. Step 2: Tie a knot in the end of your paper. Pull gently to tighten, then flatten it. The second is that you are clumsy. You haven’t always been so. In fact, you are usually quite graceful. So why the sudden tremor in your hands? Why the mess you’re making of your white paper strip, as complaint in your best friend’s hands as it is disobedient in yours? You know exactly why.   Step 3: Fold the end of the strip down and tuck it into the knot. The third thing you learn is that you loathe origami. It was a mistake to let her show you how, here in this room where there is nowhere for your feelings to run to. Those terrible radiant things. Those deathless hopes. You hate them, almost as much as origami. Step 4: Wrap the other end of the strip around and around this pentagon you have formed, creasing gently as you go. The fourth is that you are never going to make a lucky paper star. It is impossible. Your best friend is already finishing hers, pressing its angular edges until they become concave. Her lovely fingers. Your damaged star. These facts you cannot bear. Step 5: Keep wrapping until you get to the end of the strip. Tuck in the end. The fifth is that the universe is mocking you. Your fingers fumble with your paper strip, bending and creasing in all the wrong ways. You want to make this star, desperately, awfully. But you can’t. You don’t. The paper sits ruined in the palm of your hand. Step 6: Very gently and slowly use your fingernail to press on the center of each of its edges. A star should form. The sixth is that this is a metaphor. She can’t. She doesn’t. The paper sits ruined in the palm of your hand.

what is Maya made of?

soft thoughts about her

We stand at a funeral, hand in hand, under a sky bleeding glorious light. The year is dying but we are here to remember. To celebrate and to cherish. To laugh and sob, reverently, as one. We stand circular around a cavernous well, and in this well, we place bouquets of memories. There is a door rattling off its hinges. Daffodils picked in a hurry. A boy, a girl, and two hands finding each other in the darkness of a cheap movie theater. There’s a dying woman telling her sister to read her favorite book to her one last time goddamn it. Two boys shucking off clothes and leaping into the ocean, shouting and gasping as the frigid waves lick their bug-bitten calves. A gun held to someone’s temple, ruthless. Desperate mouths meeting in a train station. An I Love You written on torn notebook paper and passed across the aisle. An endlessness of January snow. There are fists on jaws and pennies dropped into fountains and meals that taste of loss. Little girls standing hopefully in front of their mirrors, looking for evidence of approaching womanhood. Hangovers and weddings. The stunned pause after a kiss. Old men in baseball caps joking at diners. A boy stepping numbly into the path of a freight train. Things said at three in the morning and regretted long after. Snapped pencil lead. A scraped elbow. Soup on a misty night. Want. This is what we have left. When the earth turns, as it always does, this will be the past. When the earth turns, it will carry us into a new year and we will burn, hats in hand, for what was. But when the earth turns, all will be fresh and flagrant, naked and breath catching. All will be ours. We stand together between death and dawn. We wait.

you celestialfemlockfemmike and decluce would make a nice family

spell out your URL in song titles and then tag 10 people. i was tagged by captainmarrvell ❤❤