favorite passages tag game
tagged by @poledancingghostson (doing this here because it was ostensibly a writing blog at some point) (main blog is @catastrophicbleus)
Post five passages you've written that you're proud of. Can be anywhere from a sentence to a few paragraphs. No time restriction. WIP or published work. Can be fanfiction or any other writing you're doing. Hell, if you want to post more (or less) than five, that's fine too. Just any work that makes you think "damn, I wrote that, huh?"
Death is white. A snowstorm that blinds and suffocates you, that turns your skin a perverse blue, like mould, or a nightmare’s sky. That’s one of the things that bothers me most about these fucking humans and their bullshit superstitions — they look at black and see their own fear and ignorance staring back at them; they see death, the charred remains of their own wars, the fetid blood of illnesses they could have avoided. They don’t know shit.
Black is the dark of winter nights you wish could last forever, those hours of blessed peace where we could almost imagine being free, those hours when — out of boldness, or ignorance, we felt ourselves safe enough to talk, whispering to each other so as not to penetrate the incorporeal cloak surrounding us, protecting us.
Black is the colour of his hair, flowing like a river where his head rests on my lap.
From: Our Passion on This Lonely Sea
He came again last night, swimming from Port Vanis because, he insists, “it’s easier.” Where and how he spends his time that swimming to these ruins is easy in comparison, I do not want to know.
He looks so tired. Sometimes I wonder if he only sleeps when he’s with me, on a damp mattress facing the ripped edge of a broken hall, overlooking the ocean. The ocean crashing against the rocks below — I keep telling him that one day he will dash his head on a boulder, or a fallen parapet, and that I will not go looking for him. We both know this is a lie. I will go, and I will look for him at the risk of my own demise. Perhaps it is all the push I need to end this pitiful thing I have come to call “life”; squatting in this empty graveyard. There are no ghosts here, nor wraiths. Ivar helped me burn the bodies — burn, not bury. He said it would be safer, that there was too high a risk of them turning into malevolent spectres that we’d just have to kill again. He had said “we” even then, his hand firm on my shoulder as we watched the pyres float on the water — fire floating on the water; a sight that surely, under different circumstances, had I been a younger, less tortured man, would have been beautiful.
The war wears on thinly. We receive news of it in drips, a little more with every new soul to enter our ranks. Hector’s afterlife swells to fullness in its own bittersweet way as not only relatives, but friends join him. Comrades and soldiers. Serfs and townspeople who adored him in life and honour him still in death. Even now many of them are eager to work his fields. It startles me to see how, by contrast, there is so little to me outside of war. How quickly I become nothing.
From that first night I could not go back to the would-be-Pelion alone, so when Hector offered me a room in his ever growing palace, I humbled myself to accept. I become his shadow, slinking silently in his wake. I remember his brother, Paris — how beautiful he had been (is — I am the past tense, not he). The quick slip of his jaw, the sharp bow of his lips, how his eyes danced as he spoke in his brother’s ear. I think how happy he seemed to always follow one step behind his brother, even though it was himself who was - is - favoured by both Aphrodite and Apollo.
I think of Patroclus. I think how much happier I could have made him if I too had been wise enough to not pursue a divinity that was never mine to grasp. It is my own fault, I know that, and yet still there is a part of me who rages at the thought of my father, so eager to let a child lead the way, and my mother with her wishful ambition. I am glad to never to see her again. I want to drag her down and ask her she still thinks it was worth it; my name, for the life I could have had.
I never ask Hector why why he allows me to follow him around so. It is only pity, I presume. Or this mutual longing — he for his wife and I for my Patroclus. “Someone will right his name in stone,” he assures me time and time again. I wonder if he means to kill me again with fruitless hope. It is only what I deserve.
He tells me about his wife, and his children. This and this and this. He is not ashamed to weep for them, but more often than not some youngling already with us will come bounding up to him, and he will wipe away his tears, smiling feelingly while they demonstrate their artistry. A newly acquire skill.
I tell him about Patroclus. About this, and this, and this. There is no one to interrupt my sorrow.
“Hey.” Ed’s fingertips on his jaw, gently tilting his face upward. They’re cold, like they always are, and Izzy presses into it slightly.
“I love you. I love you today, I loved you yesterday, and I’ll love you tomorrow. I loved you twenty years ago, and I’ll love you twenty years from now, and I’ll love you the day I die, okay?”
Izzy only nods. His nose smarting. Eyes watering. “See you at home.”
“Can’t wait,” Edward says, leaning in close, nudging Izzy’s forehead with his own.
It’s spring, but the rain does not stop. The clouds do not part to reveal the sun and they do not feel its ichorous rays on their faces, but when Izzy chuckles, and shoves Edward's shoulder, they both feel a certain warmth spreading through their cheeks. Burning in their chests.
From: Untitled Original Project
I have always been envious of novelists. Memoirists, essayists — anyone who can communicate their thoughts at length with any degree of clarity and precision. I have never owned up to my anything in my life. I never thought of myself as a poet, but I suppose that’s what I was. A mediocre student poet, filling the ivory pages of slim black notebooks with one overwrought image after another, always alluding to the sense of something to which I would never admit. I haven’t written anything in years.
tagging @iboughtaplant, @jayofolympus, @lohrendrell and really any writer who sees this and needs a pick-me-up!
