The Anatomy of An Aguamala

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Wed, 26 Oct 2011 20:06:08 +0100

Make sure you've read this: http://anne-atomy.tumblr.com/post/1624996091/secrets

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:42:42 +0000

I was suddenly sheepishly aware of the spider-scrawled revelations across my chest; a hundred sticky silk words spun in the dead of night and fastened by the finest whispers of aurulent-pink thread to my dress. Barely visible in the white columbed dance hall they were now strikingly out of place, illuminated by a single sickly lightbulb dangled precociously above our heads. Once flush with the bodice’s forgiving fabric, my goosebumps rose to attention and brought depth to the secret words; carving chasms beneath the soft “c” whispers and turning threaded “m”s to mountains.

He brushed past me, slender limbs lingering around my hips as he pulled a stepping ladder from the shelf behind me.

(Dinner calls, I’ll finish this in a minute…)

Who's Who

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:50:00 +0000

He comes flying through the cupboard door, nearly dismembering a finger in the process. Collapsing with bent knees and flustered breath, he slumps against the door frame, his articulate spine thrusting the full weight of his fragile vertebrae to barricade us in.

It’s little more than a broom cupboard, really. Small and stone-paved, littered with the remains of parties-past: half forgotten, half empty flasks, cigarette ashes in match box graves. A lone mop stands at sloppy attention like a London call girl ready for her shift. Her sopping locks are riddled with pink glitter, like she’s eaten fish scales for dinner and forgotten to wipe the remains from his self-loathing lips.

“She’ll be the death of me!”

Tom’s referring to his girlfriend. A lanky, leering girl not terribly unlike the mop analogy I’ve just described. (It’s cruel of me to think that, but he’s caught me off guard.) His tie’s gone crooked, half-undone to his ribs and swept carelessly across one shoulder. A single corner of his shirt’s untucked and cheekily bunched around his middle, draped to reveal the curve of his hip. His lips are stained pink, either from fierce kisses or fearful sprinting I’m undecided.

The ball & (happily ever) after

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:31:51 +0000

Where do you walk on sunny times/ When the rivers gleam and the buildings shine/ How do you feel goin’ up hallowed halls/ And the summer clothes brighten gloomy halls

Where do you fit in zzzzip magazine/ Where the past is the hero and the present a queen/ Just tell me right now where do you fit in/ With mud in your eye and a passion for gin /

And they’re all in love.

The thrum of whining dance music carried by chilled, icy winds sent my fingers, toes, chattering lips, creviced mind into a sort of dizzying paralysis. I needed air, sweet summer honeysuckle with warm bitter grass and light. Instead my suckling, gasping lips met pungeant rum-soiled streets and the vertiginous odor of confusion:

Four hundred hormonal, sacrificial teenagers, crazed by this rare taste of freedom from our monotonously classroom-confined lives. Hungry for the plea, “I’m only human!” Guilty, the jury of teachers agrees. But poor grades, restless hearts and listless minds are all incriminating evidence.

To escape we’ve become animals. Acrimonious wines burn the baby-pink, unwilling flesh of our throats. They’re hungry for virgin blood; for sex and lust and life.

Oh how pretty I’ll bleed.

"You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books..."

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 18:14:05 +0000

““You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn’t know this, of course you still can’t understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that’s what counts.””

- Ray Bradbury (via lunacy)

Dreams

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:38:00 +0000

We were in an underground maze of staircases and big brass elevators, forbidden catacombs of selfish territoried staircases beneath the Center.

They can’t see you if you stand still, they’re sensing heat that’s all.

You could use me.

How close can you get without him seeing?

Close enough to kiss

I’m so sorry for being MIA so often. My story isn’t finished yet; please watch for me I’ll be back soon.

I haven't been on Tumblr in a while and have missed all your lovely entries! I'm glad I will have something to read over and catch up on. Also I absolutely love the new header. Have a Merry Christmas! x

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 23:49:16 +0000

Thank you so much! A very merry Christmas to you, too! I haven’t had much time for tumblr either, I have so many unfinished entries still sitting in my drafts! I promise to write more soon!

Thank you again! xx

And I have a request from you too. Is there anyway I could get the HTML coding for this layout? It's amazing. I would, of course, leave the credit to you. I'm just looking for a cool layout and this one pretty much blows my mind.

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 23:26:31 +0000

Yeah of course! You can use the “find source” option and if that doesn’t work let me know and i’ll leave the code in your ask :)

The Box Man

Sat, 27 Nov 2010 03:52:00 +0000

The Box Man knows that loneliness chosen loses its sting and claims no victims. He declares what we all know in the secret passages of our own nights, that although we long for perfect harmony, communion, and blending with another soul, this is a solo voyage.
The first half of our lives is spent stubbornly denying it. As children we acquire language to make our selves understood and soon learn from the blank stares in response to our babblings that even these, our saviors, our parents, are strangers. in adolescence when we replay earlier dramas with peers in the place of parents, we begin the quest for the best friend, that person who will receive all thoughts as if they were her own. Later we assert that true love will find the way. True love finds many ways, but no escape from exile. The shores are littered with us, Annas and Ophelias, Emmas, and Juliets, all outcasts from the dream of perfect understanding. We might as well draw the night around us and find solace there and a friend in our own voice.

One could do worse than be a collector of boxes.

I fancy myself a collector. I’m collecting words and stories and photographs of my memories. They aren’t mine to keep, but I can cherish them during my time in this world and before I’m gone I’ll lock them away in a little wooden box and bury it under a tree who’s seen even more remarkable things than I have and hide my treasures for someone else to discover and collect all over again. That’s how i like to think of my life and if I ever feel there isn”t enough time to see every thing I’d like to see, read all the books I dream of in libraries all around the world. I just think that i’ll have to make a list like a treasure hunt, and someone else will have to explore these things for me when I start to fade.

I’m worried most about my stories.

A panicked, the-sea-is-churning-and-i’m-in-a-rowboat-without-my-oars-and-oh-dear-oh-my-i’m-slipping-and-i-forgot-how-to-swim kind of a worry. The worry sends my neurons into a flurry of anxiety, little impulses singing the corners of my brain and gasping, someone please understand, please listen these crazy thoughts I hide away in these frightening seas of my mind.

I’m worried I won’t get to write all the stories I have dancing about in my foggy little head. They come to me at midnight, clamering through my window and travelling like spirits amongst the fog under cracks in my door and through furnace-flamed air vents. They whisper sweet nothings, beating on my ear drums and playing with the tenacity of my heart: beautiful muses filling my head with make believe boys to fall in love with while I sleep. I can never remember them in the mornings.

I’m worried I don’t even have the words to explain them. I have an affinity for words maybe, but if anything I’m just a curator. Like those paper projects they gave us in kindergarten to see if we could cut straight lines and use glue sparingly, I’m arranging words on a page. Maybe that’s not enough.

What makes people feel things? Which words make us feel less alone and more beautiful and entirely loved and appreciated? I keep my best ideas under lock and key behind lips sealed with the lie cross my heart and hope to die. I’m so, so terrified for anyone to see what’s inside my mind. (At the same time, I’m desperate for it.)

It’s so hard to for me to write with TVs in the background or cars rumbling past my windows. I need peace and quiet and old parchment and a sooty pencil with a perfectly sharp tip that orchestrates a scribble-scratch soundtrack to my thoughts as I rush to get them onto the paper and out of my head. I’m trying. Please understand.

Anagram

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:38:11 +0000

the grass licked at her ankles
Fire swayed at her feet
The sky swelled up beside her
But it was the ocean she breathed

There are too many nonsense words in my mind right now. I need to write everything down and then I’ll get back to my usual stories. (I have so much to say about that party but I don’t even know how to explain it!)

The Alabaster Boy

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Oyster-slick lotion sat high on his cheek bones where he had tried to heal his wind chapped skin, paper thin and salted with freckles.

Odd for skin that hadn’t seen the sun. (Maybe the light seared through the water like it filters through magnifying glasses to set fire to dry grass on hot summers days; it found its way through the glass sea, reflecting off the pebbles, little dots burning themselves to the flesh hugging his alabaster bones.) His eyes were perpetually wet.

I once had a girl tell me she made her self cry every morning before school, just because she felt beautiful when her eyes sparkled from the streams of salt water, as they purged themselves of sleep dust and dreams from the night before.

He just looked tired. The folds of his skin purple colored like a ripe-plum bruise. Splotchy puffs of color like someone had taken a fat stub of charcoal to the underbelly of his eyelashes, painting his skin raw and inflamed.

His brooding eyes hid under feathery, moth-wing eyebrows: lush, powder white, fine as spider silk but thick like caterpillar fur across his forehead. Twin moth wings fluttering horizontally, entangling themselves in the air, knitting together in a thick bunch across his brow.

But it was only tears. The water he was so used to, beading under sleepy eyelids, rivlettes eroding the fine hairs on his cheeks, carving canyons and crevices and wrinkles into the corners of his mouth.

Just something I’m working on, a dream from years past. It sits in my mind and sometimes the wind or passing time stirs it up. For some reason it makes me lonely, but maybe if I write it we can be lonely together.

+

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 06:54:00 +0000

Claret lips on columbine skin, I was that faded, washed out portrait you find crinkled at the bottom of the wash cupboard. Ghost-like and ethereal, like a vision through the fog. White silk, white stitching, white fur, sheer stockings clinging with white-hot static to pale, dove freckled skin. I’ve lined my lips in poppy red and rimmed my eyes in heliotrope.

Oh, and I’m probably blushing.

Ballerina bones

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:41:00 +0000

I spent the morning in bed, heaped under a pile of blankets the color of snow. It was an exercise in patience, maybe even tolerance. Wearing nothing but thin négligée embroidered with french knots like a sea of goosebumps over powder white flesh, I buried myself in silky sheets and lay motionless. No squirming to ruffle the covers, causing friction to warm my naked bones. No tucking the covers up under my thighs and knee caps and heels and around the slender arch of my toes to justify the absence of socks. When I breathe my stomach creates a wave in the blankets, I gasp for oxygen like a little fish, coveting the air, sucking it into my teeth like milk through a straw. It takes the blankets a moment to settle back around my cool skin, the fluttering cotton raising goosebumps as it swells against my belly.

The party’s tonight. I should probably be getting ready.

"[Love is] absolutely ephemeral, just like time, just like everything...

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:10:00 +0000

One can find love in remembered letters, in tender embraces, in shy glances. I think it’s possible to find love and in return have someone requite that love, even if it is only for a short period of time. Just because that sort of love is fleeting doesn’t mean it isn’t powerful, it isn’t true. I think in a way that sort of love is far more true than any other kind, because in a way you give yourself completely to the other person, with no thought of the repercussions.” —pinpricks.tumblr.com

Stolen smiles, running away from fire drills, walking to class in the rain and forgetting that we aren’t supposed to be friends. Building forts underneath tin wooden desks, coveting dusty, old year books with silly pictures hidden inside. Wondering who will look at our school photos in fifty years and if they ever would have guessed how much I love you from the posed, uncomfortable smiles on our faces. They say you were a lovely mistake.
But I don’t think we were an accident. I loved you for a time and I love you whenever I think of these memories, no matter where you may be in the world.

This wasn’t the original letter, I’ll never have the courage to read that. But I will grant that post those two forbidden words:

Love,

me.

My biggest regret.

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:07:03 +0000

He was the first boy I loved absolutely unconditionally, because I was afraid no one else had ever told him how perfect he looked first thing in the morning or how it was sweet when his voice cracked and he grew a full two inches over spring break. I was afraid no one else had told him they loved him, so I decided, for the rest of my life, a part of me always would. I wrote him a letter anonymously and I always regret being too cowardly to sign a name to those sweet words. They weren’t even as kind as I wanted them to be, I was afraid he’d be able to see in my eyes how much I loved him, how my gaze lingered a fraction of a second too long. He’d read my letter and just know it was me. And that thought was terrifying.

It took me a few minutes to pour my heart out but three weeks to pluck up the courage to sign that note. How to you finish something like that? Sincerely? Yours? I didn’t have the courage to write Love,.

I used to sit staring out the window during long car rides and just think, how is it that’s he’s even alive and we’re in the same place and the same time? It’s crazy that I know him and he could be mine. And he probably could have been.

Sometimes we love people so much that we have to be numb to it. Because if we actually felt how much we love them, it would kill us. That doesn’t make you a bad person. It just means your heart’s too big.

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:00:00 +0000

I’ve been cuddled under my duvet play acting like I’m a sleeping bear. It’s winter and I need to hibernate, to build a wall of snow between my fragile body and this frozen world.

I’m in bed sorting through old film and reading my biggest regret ever while ruminating on the meaning of ephemeral love. In my state of hibernation I’m avoiding the answer that will provide a rude awakening: it’s fading fast.

Maybe once love was real, when people spoke in flowery tongues and romance languages and romanced each other with pearls and carriage rides through the countryside. Maybe when soldiers went to war dressed in wool coats with brass buttons to fight for their starry-eyed child brides. Maybe when suitors scaled brick walls and serenaded their sleeping beauties from cobblestone streets. When people wrote poems and braved the sea and sands and time and troubles for one simple kiss.

Does this still happen?

My biggest regret is being too scared to find out. People don’t talk like they used to, conversations are condensed into 140 characters or less, abbreviated beyond belief, summarized. They leave out the pretty bit, spelling’s atrocious and messages are always lost in translation. The spring that I turned fifteen I didn’t have the courage to say Dakota I love you. But I really, truly did.

Experimenting with hand-bound books...

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 21:04:39 +0000

I was thinking that over the holidays I might try to collect some of my silly words in a book of some sort. I’ve looked at blurb and lulu.com but they just aren’t raw enough for what I’m thinking:

textured paper covers in candy bright colors, each one-of-a-kind
aged paper inners printed on heavy-weight parchment (the kind with little lilac remnants and seeds)
illustrations in ink and pencil with tiny embroidery stitching

If I were to make a few, would anyone be interested in owning them? I’ll borrow excerpts from my blog, mixed with some new thoughts so dear to me that I’m afraid to post them online. Please reply (or leave a note in my ask) if you would considering purchasing a little piece of my heart.

heytherekate: have you ever thought about what protects our...

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:06:36 +0000

heytherekate:

have you ever thought about what protects our hearts? just a cage of rib bones and other various parts. so its fairly simple to cut right through the mess and to stop the muscle that makes us confess. we are so fragile.

Jaculiferous: having a spine resembling a row of darts

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:01:00 +0000

He has a back like that, muscular with a tiny row of knots protruding from the vertebrea along his spine. One day we’ll all just be big piles of bones. (I wonder if it will be sooner rather than later.)

Do you ever feel the need to scream at strangers on the street, I love you! because you’re afraid no one else will? We’re forced to abide by the pleasantries and formalities of modern socieltal life. Casual flirting, boys text you first, date one: dinner, date three: sex, year three: marriage, kids, fall out of love, divorce…

“I don’t think you can ‘fall out of love’ they way we define it today, Anna.”

Louisa and I conversed in hushed tones in the library, “People have so perfected their means of living that they forget what it’s like to be alive. It’s entirely about sex and fortune and celebrity, finding someone to share your life with takes the back seat to finding a girl to snog you tonight.”

I’m trying to remember what I thought love was when I was a child. I don’t think we should forget those little things; growing up means conforming and becoming boring and I wish I still believed in the love that happens in fairy tales.

“But L, We forget that love is ephemeral, you can’t break it into a science. I think all those moments, the ones where you get butterflies and your heart quickens and your palms sweat, shouldn’t those count?”

“For lust.”

“But I think those moments are the most precious, honest things we have. It’s before we come to realize what’s wrong with a person: he’s too loud, too clumsy, flirts too much with other girls. It’s this moment where fate steps in and makes this wonderful connection and in that second they can do no wrong. That can’t only be lust because your heart pounds so fast all the blood must surely be in your chest rather in in your nethers and, at least for me, I hardly ever can look anywhere but the boy’s eyes.

It doesn’t matter what he’s wearing, or how tall he his, or if he’s sweet to look at. If there are butterflies when our eyes connect I feel like I’m seeing a little bit of his soul. I love that, at least.”

“And then?”

I’m dejected, a deflated sign escapes my lips because society has me beat. “Nothing. There’s no bit of etiquette, no system that dictates a set of rules for what I can do. ‘You can’t be in love after just a moment,’ ‘He’ll look at someone else like that ten seconds later,’ ‘Get on with your life you can’t love someone you don’t know.’ But after that, I want to know.

What if everyone else is as sick of this loveless life as I am? What if we need a little magic?”

And what if those moments could be the line between life and death? What if, driven insane by this monotony and loveless, marriage -for-the-sake-of-convenience monogamy, people decided maybe they’d be better off just a pile of bones?

The Sepulchre by the Sea

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 16:32:00 +0000

Can you hear me, over the rain? I feel like one of those spinning-top girls, the ballerinas in glass jewelry boxes who don’t know to start dancing until the lid’s up. (Oh, the thunder’s too loud, I’ve missed my cue.)

These words are coming to you from the library tower, a multifaceted gem of a building, six stories high and made of clear glass alight a tower of stone. We keep the books for sorting up here, lost treasures and beautiful things people have forgotten how to read: a dictionary of lost words, the little known poems of e.e. cummings, manuscripts from some of the classical greats. They’re damaged soldiers, bindings strewn across the dusty shelves and pages upon pages collecting like day old party confetti on the floor. It’s beautiful.

And it’s like a sepulchre, really. My words come here to die. In the tower the take flight like little sparrows, bouncing off the glass like southern flies trapped in a screen porch confused by the meaning of walls. Here no one can silence me, my echoing footsteps last indefinitely, scoring my words with sweet, soft melodies. A thumping baseline to compliment the crisp turn of a worn page or scribble of ink across fresh paper.

Because I never talk like this outside of my glass prison. My word’s aren’t well-acclimated, they wouldn’t survive. They turn into yes pleases and no thank yous and that’s nices and fuck yous. There’s no room for pleasantries anymore, soft asides, proclamations of love spoken in soft tones. We text and fret and forget.

~~Fuck you.~~