Seattle. I’ll take her there to fall in love with the city I love.
2 days ago - 
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Mel Vianie's Mark on the Map
Full Time Student. LA. Cyclist. Reader. Writer. Photography. Gym Addict. Disney Afficionado. Flannel. Sweaters. Winter/Autumn. Scarfs. Beaches. Gleek. Nature. Cities. Traveler. Shifter.
And then the elephant kissed the butterfly very gently and the butterfly said: ‘Why didn’t you ever before come down into the valley where I live?’ And the elephant answered, ‘Because I did nothing all day. But now that I know where you live, I’m coming down the curling road to see you every day, if I may—and may I come?’ Then the butterfly kissed the elephant and said: ‘I love you, so please do.’
And every day after this the elephant would come down the curling road which smelled so beautifully (past the seven trees and the bird singing in the bush) to visit his little friend the butterfly.
And they loved each other always.
The Elephant and the Butterfly by E.E. Cummings (via lunardimension)
(via possibilistfanfiction)
Hello Little Duck.
I always have this delicious reaction to Seattle once I’ve become grounded in LA again. It wakes this desire in me to live. No pressure to excel or stand out, but to live happily, fully, and completely. I feel so free when I think of Seattle being home. When I think of being an editor, a journalist, a writer, an activist. I’d be a certified massage therapist on the weekends and weekday nights when I need the extra money. I’d go to shows on the the weekdays and backpack with my partner on the weekends. Seattle has a vice grip on my heart. She is mine and I am meant to be there; of this I am sure. Someday she will be the address 1 and 2 in all my letters. Not just the home of my heart.
4 days ago - 1
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What I would give to undo what’s been done to you.
What I would pay to know what to say to make everything okay.
What I would change to make sure you can always feel safe.
What a world I would create… To my littlest friend. My newest friend.
Know that you are not weak.
Know that you are not alone.
Know that you are not at fault.
I will be here, always, should you ever need me.
(Source: leonovaks)
1 month ago - 2
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I just finished watching this. Heard about it through YM&C. Saw it on Netflix and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now everything in my head is being said in a funny accent. Aesthetically it was very beautifully shot. The soundtrack was wonderful. The cinematography was superb.
(Source: cunty, via setthetempo)
So I figured out what that feeling was. Either my brother and I are too connected or the universe likes to make me believe in funny things. I was feeling something earlier. Something that was distracting me from my studies. It was out of body, something outside, it felt like a fire. Not a roaring fire, but more like a constant fire. The sound and warmth of a bonfire that sort of just crackles as you sit on the beach. I couldn’t pinpoint the disturbance in my thoughts. Something was up, it was outside my body, but it was affecting me. Suddenly, I felt the familiar longing for a person that I could talk to, a friend who desired my company as much as I desired theirs. I tossed the thought aside and then turned on a film, set the fans on high, and grabbed my lavender seed ball. I needed white noise.
So I lay back and let my mind go quiet. I banished all thoughts for their uselessness and gave into the static. Then my phone rang. I smiled at the number and so began an hours worth of conversation with my brother. I was sure that my Mad Hatter had heard my thoughts through the looking glass. He talked a lot mind you, but it wasn’t static. I had my friend. His words sculpted stories and as I heard him speak, I could not help but feel blessed that I would have such a person in my life. My blood brother. He was my playmate in childhood, a bully at the worst of times, and an irreplaceable friend at his best. And I am blessed, to have a mad man for a brother, and a brother for a best-friend.
1 month ago - 3
3Some people bring out the worst in you, others bring out the best, and then there are those remarkably rare, addictive ones who just bring out the most. Of everything. They make you feel so alive that you’d follow them straight into hell, just to keep getting your fix.
Karen Marie Moning (via loveyourchaos)
(Source: vastpastiche, via shakingbranches)
The Pre-Law Organization at Fullerton College invites you to our campus this Friday to take a Practice LSAT, fully proctored by the Princeton Review. Space is limited.
1 month ago - 1
1
Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be like to have to fold myself up so I could fit in a tiny carrying case. I like to imagine that I can detach pieces of myself and feel them as an entity outside of myself. I am, after all, the sum of many parts. It’s fun to imagine.
So, I’ve just come back from a trip to Seattle. I was expecting a trip full of enlightenment and deep thinking. Mostly I had fun with my brother. We did our thing and we were brother and sister… out there in Seattle. While I was there I had hoped that maybe nothing else would matter, but I couldn’t let go of reality so easily. That escape, I am afraid, can only be attained through books.
When I returned, I came back to the monotony of work and school and the morning commute. I was still at home. My mother was still unhappy and my father still trying to find a happy medium. My car was still smelly and my room was as small as I could have remembered.
I came back just as much the Melissa I had been when I left. I can honestly say that I was not expecting otherwise, but that I sincerely hoped otherwise. Now, here I am, two days later. I’m listening to Passion Pit reading Happy Agony after a crappy day at school and I am swimming in that blissful temporary happiness that sort of imitates mild hallucinogens. I get this way when I read. It’s best to catch me after a gym run or after I have spent time reading amazing books or after a heated debate. Yup, that is the Aries in me.
Anywho (I literally got distracted for a solid twenty minutes right there) I’m just procrastinating on the writing of my essay. Mostly because I’m still a little flustered over the day’s events. I think I’ll do some cleaning and then some planning and it’ll calm me down. I wish I could go to the gym, because I feel all tense. I need to get this essay done though. So here goes. Happy Tuesday!
(Source: die-zombie)
To the first man, who I met by the Eiffel Tower my second week in Paris, when I didn’t know better. Who took me out four times, who waved little red flags that I tried to ignore. Like asking me outright if I was a virgin on the first date, like calling me five different pet names when I’d asked him not to throughout the second, like saying he’d heard that feminists were not real women during the third, like disappearing for a week and a half after the fourth. Who, as it turns out, was not the bullet, but the careening fourteen-wheeler that I narrowly managed to dodge. Who admitted that he hit the young woman that his mother was trying to force him to marry. Who didn’t want to marry her because he believes in romantic love. Who doesn’t see the contradiction in those two sentences.
To the guy in my medieval literature class, who lent me one of Camus’ plays and showed me around the library. Who wants to use his French education not to escape to the West, but to go back to his developing nation to teach at its eight-year-old university. Who I admired until he asked me what my American boyfriend had thought about me coming to Paris, until he demanded to know why I didn’t have one (a boyfriend, that is), until he asked if it was required that I marry an American. Who reached out and touched my earrings, without asking, the next time he saw me. Who won’t take a hint.
To the PhD student who tried to take me up to his apartment after a five minute conversation, when I had just wanted to get lunch, who said there’s a first time for everything. Who told me that we were university students, living in a 21st century democracy, and that relations between men and women were different now, so what was I so scared of? Who recoiled in shock when I told him that I had friends who’d been raped, and by other university students, at that. Who does not have to think about rape on a daily basis. Who insisted on paying for my lunch, because “it was a matter of honor.” Who then physically prevented me from handing my money to the cashier, when I was trying to make it clear that this was not a date. Who didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t want a boyfriend, five times. Whose number I blocked the moment I stepped on the metro. Who has called me three times since. Who told me he wants to go into Senegalese politics. Who, I can only hope, will listen to the women of his country better than he listened to me.
To the delivery guy on the red motorcycle idling outside of the apartments on Avenue de Porte de Vanves, the ones I walk past every day, who said bonsoir and who, because I said it in return to be polite, followed me to the metro as I walked, head twisted down, pretending that I didn’t understand the language I’ve studied for eight years.
To the two men Thursday night in le Marais, swaggering drunk toward me, ignoring the male friend standing by my side, who leered at my chest and slurred, “Bonsoir, comme tu es mignonne,” as I shoved past them, trying to sound angry, not afraid. Who left me feeling fidgety and panicked, so when I took the night bus in the wrong direction and found myself alone with two other strange men at a bus stop at 2:30 A.M., I let the cab driver fleece me out of 25 euro just to take a taxi home.
To the group of teenage boys loitering on the corner by my apartment, who decided to sound a siren at my approach because I was wearing a knee-length dress and a bulky sweater. Who made me regret forgoing tights because I had wanted to feel the spring air on my calves for once. Who will never have to wear an itchy pair of pantyhose in their entire lives. To whom I said nothing, because I still have to walk past that corner twice a day for the next three-and-a-half months, because there were five of them and one of me.
To the three men standing on the corner of the periphery five minutes later when I was crossing the street. To the one who motioned for his friends to turn and look at me, quick, and then left his wolf-whistle ringing in my ears, shame like sunburn covering my face. Who didn’t care that it was broad daylight. Who made me wish that I could swear a blue streak back in French, without my accent betraying that I am American, which is another word for “easy” here.
To the two men at sunset on the bridge by Saint Michel, in the middle of tourist central, who made skeeting noises at me, like a pair of sputtering mosquitoes, to get my attention. Who laughed when I flipped them off, and who kept hissing at me anyway. Who forced me to keep checking over my shoulder, all the way to the metro, to make sure that I wasn’t being followed.
But also to the French friend who blamed my problems with French men on my university in the northern suburbs, a Parisian synonym for emeutes, gang violence, and immigration. Who insisted that if he brought me to his upper-crust private (white) university—where the French elite reproduces itself into perpetuity—I would meet nicer French guys. Who forced me to defend the men who’d harassed me against his barely-veiled, racist critique.
And also to the American friend at home who nearly rolled his eyes as he half-listened to my stories, who said, “Oh god, it’s hard being so attractive, isn’t it?” as if I was being vain. Who laughs and does not understand why I always duck out of the frame of photographs, who knows nothing of what my body means to me.
And that’s just two months in Paris.
To all the Italian men who made me wish I had dyed my hair black before studying in Florence, who kept me from going out dancing because I got sick of feeling them creeping up behind me, sneaking their hands around my waist (and lower) when I’d already said NO three times.
To the six-foot-something Georgetown student who prided himself on protecting the girls from being groped on the dance floor. Who chose to write about the rape of the Sabine woman for that week’s assignment. Who described the way her breast slipped free of her tunic when she fell, as if he was writing a porno, not a rape scene, who had the woman fall in love with her Roman rapist the next morning, after he spun her a tale of the coming glory of his country. Who said “in a fit of passion, she thrust herself upon his member” and was not joking. Who ended the story with the titular character saying to her children that she had been raped, but only at first.
To the seventh-grade boy who told my younger sister that he could rape her, if he wanted to.
To the gang of twenty-five year-olds in the Jeep who hollered at her as they drove past, leering at her thirteen-year-old body dressed in sweat pants and a tank top. Who made my sister, fearless on the soccer field and in the classroom and in the karate studio, run home crying. Who were the reason she became afraid to walk the dog by herself in our “safe, suburban” neighborhood.
To my father, who said, “What white male privilege?” who was not being ironic.
Julia Maddera (via colporteur)
(Source: thelittlekneesofbees, via quiethandsquietkiss)
I want to focus on homework so I get off the computer, but then I have so many thoughts I feel like if I could just get them out of me I would be able to focus on my homework. So I reopen my blog, then I just get stuck and frustrated… Rinse and Repeat for the last 2 hours… How I wish I had a stop clock.
