The Hunger Games

 Hello Everyone, I know it's been far too long since I've posted. Life has been insanely busy and I just haven’t had the time. Hopefully that will all change soon.

But I just wanted to drop by and ask a massive favour from you all. If you could scan this code for me, I will love you forever. It’s for Panem October, a Hunger Games ARG. If you haven’t read the books, I strongly recommend that you do.

Thank you so much for all your support. 

“Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favour!”

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

You're all geniuses, and you're all beautiful. You don't need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you'll get it as soon as you like.

"Sometimes I don't get you,' I said.
She didn't even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, 'You never get me. That's the whole point."

Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes—not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment.

All the same without you in it, is empty.

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there, right from the start, in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips, there was pride in that smile, and confidence in the set of her fine nose, without understanding why, i knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance, and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost, swimming, floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady, even stare; her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be, if the sea were perfect.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

"I've been mad for years, absolutely years."

“She said, you cannot hide forever, though you may try. I’ve seen you in the kitchen, in the garden. I’ve seen the things you have sewn—certains of dawn, twilight blankets and dresses for the sisters like a garden of stars. I have heard the stories you tell. You are the one who transforms, who creates. You can go out into the world and show others. They will feel less alone because of you, they will feel understood, unburdened by you, awakened by you, freed of guilt and shame and sorrow. But to share with them you must wear shoes you must go out you must not hider you must dance and it will be harder you must face jealousy and sometimes rage and desire and love which can hurt most of all because of what can then be taken away. So make that astral dress to fit your own body this time. And here are glass shoes made from your words, and the stories you have told like a blower with her torch forming the thinnest, most translucent sheets of light out of what was once sand. But be careful; sand is already broken but glass breaks. The shoes are for dancing not running away.”

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: a human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

"He is not a bad person. He is a good person, alive in a bad time."

Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late—it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one. And what is this queer sensation that you’re a conspirator? Lightly, stealthily you move about your room. You take something off the dressing-table and put it down again without a sound. And everything, even the bed-post, knows you, responds, shares your secret…

“Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the oceans of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me and pinned it to the sky.”

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.

The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.

The past beats inside me like a second heart

 [She] has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary-and terribly elegant.

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”

She was helpful in all ways, and very gentle with the children, but she lingered more hours dreaming by the river, and often at twilight she climbed the hill back of the cabin and sat there alone, her cheek in the hollow of her hand, until the great planes of distance were lost, and all the hills drew together in one dark profile against the sky.

She strung the afternoon on the necklace of memorable days, which was not too long for her to be able to recall this one or that one; this view, that city; to finger it, to feel it, to savour, sighing, the quality that made it unique. It was something that lasted; something that mattered for ever.

You're at peace because you know it's okay to be afraid.

So take a chance and don’t ever look back.

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds.

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

A reason for breathing

To those who have given up on love, I say, “Trust life a little bit.”

 “Always”

“And forever”

From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light—a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut’s eyes. In about one and a half centuries—after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs—the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.

Now she imagines him dreaming. She imagines him dreaming of her, as she is dreaming of him. Through a sky the colour of wet slate they fly towards each other on dark invisible wings, searching, searching, doubling back, drawn by hope and longing, baffled by fear. In their dreams they touch, they intertwine, it’s more like a collision, and that is the end of the flying. They fall to earth, fouled parachutists, botched and cindery angels, love streaming out behind them like torn silk. Enemy ground fire comes up to meet them.

His voice was as intimate as the rustle of sheets.

"It took my lifetime to finally understand: home is a person."

He yawned. And I felt so much. His lips shined for a moment from licking them a moment before. I wondered what he tasted in his mouth, Like sipping wine, I wanted to savor him. My lips an inch from his I swayed my face like a cradle, my eyes softly shut. Slightly opened I inhaled him, sometimes feeling the glacial air from his breath piercing into the wetness of my mouth. My eyes opened, pulling back. The color of our eyes mixed and intertwined as we stared at each other. Looking in his eyes I traveled into the future. I scanned the border of his almond shaped telescopes; the lithosphere of his aching stare. All I saw was loving, and I wanted to dig my way in. To that core that burns like fire, to that center that makes me feel whole.

I stood above the wooden bridge, with my arms wrapped tightly around my body, listening to the river rush by. The wind blew lightly, sending shivers down my spine. The sun was setting, disappearing slowly behind the trees. I swayed back and forth with the music that was playing over and over in my head as I took in a deep breath and relaxed. I closed my eyes, smiling to myself absentmindedly. A warm pair of arms snaked across my waist, as the body held me closer to theirs. You rested your chin on my shoulders and kissed my neck softly. I knew this body and these lips from anywhere. I sighed happily, my heart beating faster than ever. I wish this moment could last, just having you right by side, everything would be alright.

I wanted to be with him all the time, wanted the taste of his lips on mine, his roaming fingers on my hungry skin. His fire to thaw my ice.

I love you like a semicolon; a half-pause in a torrent of thought during which life stutters into being. I want to take you in the breathless spaces between ellipses where passion builds and shudders into a trailing afterthought.

"I love you, I know this must come as something of a surprise, since all I’ve ever done is scorn you and degrade you and taunt you, but I have loved you for several hours now, and every second, more. I thought an hour ago that I loved you more than any woman has ever loved a man, but a half hour after that I knew that what I felt before was nothing compared to what I felt then. But ten minutes after that, I understood that my previous love was a puddle compared to the high seas before a storm. Your eyes are like that, did you know? Well they are. How many minutes ago was I? Twenty? Had I brought my feelings up to then? It doesn’t matter. I love you so much more now than twenty minutes ago that there cannot be comparison. I love you so much more now than when you opened your hovel door, there cannot be comparison. There is no room in my body for anything but you. My arms love you, my ears adore you, my knees shake with blind affection. My mind begs you to ask it something so it can obey. Do you want me to follow you for the rest of your days? I will do that. Do you want me to crawl? I will crawl. I will be quiet for you or sing for you, or if you are hungry, let me bring you food, or if you have thirst and nothing will quench it but Arabian wine, I will go to Araby, even though it is across the world, and bring a bottle back for your lunch. Anything there is that I can do for you, I will do for you; anything there is that I cannot do, I will learn to do. I know I cannot compete with the Countess in skills or wisdom or appeal, and I saw the way she looked at you. And I saw the way you looked at her. But remember, please, that she is old and has other interests, while I am seventeen and for me there is only you. Dearest Westley—I’ve never called you that before, have I?—Westley, Westley, Westley, Westley, Westley,—darling Westley, adored Westley, sweet perfect Westley, whisper that I have a chance to win your love."

Hold my heart, its beating for you anyways.

Holding hands may seem like an innocent gesture, but they show more than a simple interlocking of fingers. Your hands are one of the most essential parts of your body: you build with them, feed with them, hold with them, touch with them, fight with them; they are the tools of the human body. To take a hold of another’s hand is to break from living individually. It is to link yourself to another being, to momentarily entwine your life with another’s, to promise, for a moment, that you need not face the world alone. More simple, more aesthetically naive than other forms of affection, i.e kissing, hugging, sexing, the act of holding hands is often trivialized in its true implications.  As the Beatles once said: "All I want to do is hold your hand."

“My hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and i can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.”

“My body is crying for you,” you say. Most beautiful sentence I heard in my life.

Of mystery there is no end.

In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can.

we had no choice but to live in a time of abrupt flowers.

"And I remember the skin of your fingers, the spot three quarters up I’d always touch when I was out of things to say. You held my hand, but you were too afraid to speak and I could never understand. I remember when you leaned in quick to kiss me, and I swear, that not a single force on earth could stop the trembling of my hand. And I remember how you smiled through the smoke in a crowded little coffeehouse and laughed at all my jokes. And I remember the way that you dressed and, how we wasted all the best of us in alcohol and sweat."

They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes.  They were both pale and thin; but those sick, pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life.  They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

Then he almost, but didn't, say the two sentences he'd been meaning to say for years: Part of me is made of glass.  And also, I love you.

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love.  His hat was old, his coat was threadbare - there were holes at his elbows; the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul.

Smoke dances from beeswax lips, hovering before my face like fleeting phantoms. I breathe ghosts. In and out. Nostalgic and quiet and lingering between reality and superstition, present and past, i embody the bodiless with a grace absent from my clumsy little feet. pen in hand, i map the contours of souls, sketch the intimate landscape of clandestine hearts, and i carry them in a notebook with worn and dog-eared pages, the weight of its immeasurable contents easing the loneliness which ebbs and flows and throbs like an ocean within my ribs. My room is a museum of my heart, filled with books and dried flowers, tea pots and mountains of pillows, musty air thick with incense and imperceptible heartbeats. A sanctuary of spring’s creativity and autumn’s fragility, it is the in between of seasons, a nest of clover flowers and brittle twigs, that soothes like chamomile on my tender tongue. Clutter manifests a semblance of order in a mind of comets chasing their own tails round and round and round. And i plan to glue a plastic galaxy above my head, glowing like fixated fireflies, and i will create my own constellations, their stories an extension of me. Daydreams drip of tangled limbs like the roots of cypress trees, thin fingers pointing and lips unabashedly smiling, as words tumble like a meteor shower above our heads. I miss the electricity, the shuddering of my leaves from the breathing breeze of another, the warm caverns created from two bodies pressed close. I miss. And that is why i breathe ghosts and adhere artificial galaxies to my cobwebbed ceiling. That is why i cling to memories and movie tickets. That is why closure evades me like a deer in the thicket and that is why my soul is as old as the moon, the sun, and the stars. I breathe ghosts.

There are all kinds of silence and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.

Someone, and no matter where, collects the pieces of my shadow.

I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place, patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches…

One rose is enough for the dawn.

Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers, of living moments, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it.  Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice said. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
"Nor I," said the March Hare."
Alice sighed wearily.
"I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers."
"But that's life," proclaimed the Hatter.

Whether I'm right or wrong, there's no phrase that hits like an ocean needs the sand or a dirty old shoe that fits. And if all the world was perfect, I would only ever want to see your scars. You know, they can have their universe. We'll be in the dirt designing stars. And darling, you know you make me feel so beautiful. Nowhere else in the world I wanna be. You make me feel so beautiful.