January 2012
51 posts
Anonymous asked: hi, i love your writing. i just wanna ask, where does your writing come from? i write, and it comes from a really dark place. does yours?
December 2011
70 posts
1 tag
I’ll never understand why beautiful is the no. 1 compliment for so many people. I’ve always been of a belief system along the lines of here’s my face, and now here’s me behind it. I’m detached from my body, almost. How can you not be? You’re not a body. You just live in it. Praising beauty is like telling someone how much you like the wrapping paper. I mean,...
Chloe Caldwell, "Please Continue the Story" essay →
3 tags
“I’m calling from the pay phone across the street, outside the diner, and I’m probably going to run out of quarters real soon. I’ll talk fast, then.
I have a question. Am I a phony?
I think I’m calling you because I know you won’t be able to answer honestly. I’m a coward, what can I say? I just needed to ask. And when I say phony, I mean it in the full...
2 tags
Some days, or nights, I come to this realization that writing is all I have. And I’m not even that great at it. I’m not horrible, I don’t think, and I’m only sixteen, so I have plenty of time, if you like to think in terms of variants. But it is all I have. And I know it is all I will have, because I could never see myself doing anything else, because I can’t, and...
1 tag
Hi. I’m biting on my sleeve, like a child, picking my words carefully. I’m thinking about people who did exist and some who still do exist who don’t seem real. You read a biography and you think it’s story, when you hear how they’d lived. I want to be like that. Ethereal, unreal. These people who seems to swim rather than walk. Belonging so indescribably on some other...
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“It is of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat...”
– David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
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I don’t know when it started, but I’ve noticed lately that I have a lot of trouble writing if I know nobody’s going to read it (or, say, like a big project, with nobody reading it until it’s finished) and this is kind of becoming a problem. Because sometimes you just need to write for yourself, you know? You need to tell yourself things without other people knowing what...
2 tags
I’ve been wearing thin, lately, fraying; I think I could look through my chest to the wall behind it, if I tried. There’s just not much here anymore. I don’t even have any shames or secrets niggling inside like tapeworms, no unsent letters or crackling phone connections, whispers late at night. There is just me. No music or fanfare. And I think I’ve never realized how...
Post-Christmas depression has started early this year…
“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for...”
– Margaret Atwood
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Swallow thickly, and write it out write it out write it out write it out write it out write it out and even if it’s completely fucking awful writing, at least it’s not inside you anymore.
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she wonders what she’ll hold onto when she’s older
what will stick to the flypaper in her mind.
she rubs the callouses on her fingers
(she puts too much of herself into what she writes)
and tries to remember something, something
that sings like a story, but maybe it’s not a story
she should be looking for.
she examines her scars—is there a story here?—under...
Is it worth learning French just to read untranslated Arthur Rimbaud? (Maybe…)
1 tag
I promise that you don’t see yourself clearly. And, in all likelihood, you think you’re a whole lot greater than you are. The rare people, the wonderful people, are those who don’t.
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It had that same bleary-edged, overt shininess
of that fleeting sensation of when you are at a party,
maybe souped up on something or another, possibly just caffeine,
when you are standing alone outside on a
back porch reaching through the melting ice surrounding
the cans and bottles of a cooler, when you swear your hand
can feel the cold underneath and inside
your bones
and you stare out...
1 tag
I am thinking about the appearance of freedom vs. the actual thing itself. Because real freedom, true freedom is scary, untethered anarchy, it is skydiving at a hundred mph yet it is also eerily motionless, it is also anyone’s guess and anyone’s definition…I am running through my hall of mirrors, my bad neighborhood, trying to find a safe, steady place where nothing is inside out...
1 tag
“Ah,
you’re just a copy
of all the candy bars
I’ve ever eaten.”
– Richard Brautigan, “Xerox Candy Bar”
Sitting down and writing tomorrow, paragraphs, looooong things…need to break this curse of the past few weeks. For now I’m just going to read ‘til my brains fall out of my ears.
1 tag
Claustrophobia. Maybe that’s all that it is. Claustrophobia within my own life, my own body. I’ve always known there’s something my body’s been trying to expel, that’s left me dry heaving more days/nights than I can remember and maybe it’s me, all my stringy guts and seeds.
sleeping is the only thing that’s made sense lately…
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“Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There’s a strong streak of...”
– David Foster Wallace, 1996
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Weather inside me—constant dreary drizzle; color gray
I want to find a tiger in the misty woods, barred in a cage, release it and raise it and protect it, like a story I read once when I was little
I want a cause, a fight, I want distractions, I want mattering
I don’t want people, I want something bigger than people.
They shot the tiger at the end
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Sixteen going on really old
I’m listening to Radiohead and feeling generally unable to express myself. (Maybe if I cut off an ear I’d be able to draw myself more clearly). All I see tonight is yawning blankness. To be fair, compared to most people, my feelings aren’t developed and/or expanded healthily. I’m buried under a lot of things. I bury a lot of things. And besides that, there’s just not...
clavicola:
Loneliness isn’t a condition you can prescribe pills for. Everyone I know has some sort of broken heart or a splinter that they’re too tired to notice lodged into their chest. If you leave me alone for too long I’ll throw my soul against the pavement from a thirty-seven story window just to see if I can land on my feet. That’s how my uncle died, but we’re not supposed to talk about...
1 tag
From yesterday
Seventy percent of my body is composed of water…and it’s boiling. My anger is strangely similar to my sense of longing; I simmer quietly. I am a good little girl, I only scream on the inside.
Anonymous asked: what have you loved then?
1 tag
Is being special the same as being defective?
This has happened several times now, these interruptions, realizations, whatever you want to call them, when I realize that I really don’t know anything and I should stop fucking acting like I do. I’m good at self-analysis, but give me practical application and…I’m screwed. All preconcieved notions fall to pieces. Why do I even...
1 tag
(I walked on my knees for the first year of my life because I was afraid if I stood up I would fall. Not much has changed since…)
My sister was born two years after me. I remember staring at her, with Sesame Street playing in the background, all bright colors and annoying voices. She was beautiful; she had Shirley Temple ringlets and a face to match. Strangers would stop my mother at the...
“If school days are the happiest days of your life, I’m hanging myself with...”
– Jackie O at 16, in a letter to her boyfriend
1 tag
If I could choose to become anybody, I would be Stargirl.
1 tag
I don't really mind if no one is listening...
There is an honesty in nighttime, I think, an openness; I watch the sky through slitted blinds, the way the stars don’t shine for anyone else—I can tell—and the earth is growling and unsteady, it doesn’t bother holding itself together, instead cracking and leaking something akin to water vapor, but invisible…I don’t care if that doesn’t make sense to you,...
“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves...”
– Anne Sexton
Anonymous asked: i know that this may sound weird, but have you ever been in love?
I…am an…ellipse fiend…
