I’m still so afraid of all the monsters that I never want anyone to know or even know about, that no one should ever have to know at all.
Read MoreNatalia Drepina
Michael Kestin
Do This in Remembrance of Me
My mother says that she feels the presence of my aunt a lot. Something in the way the curtains move and shake when the wind blows makes my mother feel her there. I’ve never experienced that. A month ago, however, I experienced something else. I had dreams about her often after she died. In the beginning, it felt kind of her to show up like that. Despite the experience of watching her die and then seeing her body leave, I never had nightmares. It was always dreams about her talking to me and being confused over my crying. Even in my dreams I would cry because I was aware of it being a dream.
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Every Single Reason You Should Brag Your Pushcart Nominations
All the petty energies expended on downtalking the nominations or defending your own excitement is better spent, I promise. Like on resistance. Or supporting people. Or writing more
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Jeff Kravitz
The Death of an Artist - Kurt Cobain
In his final letter to humanity, Kurt writes at the end of the letters, “I’ll be at your altar.” If he is speaking to humanity he must be referencing the altar of religion, of fate. If he is speaking to his wife he must mean the altar on which they built their lives: the one filled with drugs, rehab, and guitars. But maybe he’s speaking to his daughter, just a two year old girl at time of her father’s suicide, and he means he will be at her crib, her bedroom altar, waiting for her like a father feels he should. Kurt was a mystery for most of the world. Though many of us would argue we knew him all along.
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The Barbaric Silencing of Transgender & Non-Binary People
Next month, you are turning 15. It’s almost December and you have Joan Jett hair and you are so excited to just have been kissed. You haven’t told anyone about being kissed, however, because you were kissed by two girls near the restrooms in a mall—and that’s the only place you can find privacy when your moms don’t let you close your bedroom door. When you can’t be alone.
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Boyer d'Agen
I Believe in Ghosts: A Tragedy
I asked her to show herself to me. Please. I needed her to show herself to me. "I’m all alone," I said, "I swear I won’t be afraid." Sometimes it made me cry when she didn’t show. When not so much as a light would flicker or an object on the dash would move. There was no sign at all. I cried or I shouted or I grew very afraid.
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Yume No Ire via The Ardorous
Strawberry Rhubarb Jam
Because Pauline? She was dead. And it couldn’t have been her daughter because she had stopped by the day before she left and dropped off the secret recipe to Pauline’s strawberry rhubarb jam. That jam had been our family’s favorite for years, but until now, the only way we could have any was when she brought it to us in the summertime herself.
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Wonder Woman (2017)
What Wonder Woman Means to Me
When I was a little girl, my favorite women were women with dark hair. I liked strong female characters with dark hair: Sporty Spice and Xena the Warrior Princess, but mostly I loved Wonder Woman. Her hair was dark like mine and I admired her ability to fight for truth, justice, and compassion. There were never any Wonder Woman movies, only cartoons that came and went. Over time, I became a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan too. I gravitate to women who move mountains for the betterment of humankind. Aside from shows like Buffy, the representation of such strong women was sparse. Most women are portrayed as detrimentally broken and that’s how they came to be strong. And that’s okay, but I often wondered then, as I do now, why couldn’t women just be strong because they are?
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Daniel J. Butler
Things My Illness Took from Me
When I ride the subway I become so many ages, I carry so many different years, and they appear in layers inside of me in a way I wish I could erase
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via Alchetron
What the Cost of Affiliation Is Like
It isn’t all bad here. I hope everyone knows that. I hope everyone could grow to love the walnut trees that line my driveway. Love the tea that everyone drinks here. Love the way that I have always been amiable and able to talk to strangers on a basic level. I’m not sure that I have accepted these things are beautiful or good yet. This place, my place, has left me so empty that I cannot call it home. I’m trying to love it without thinking about the horror I have seen within it. But can you do that? Can you leave it behind? Everyone must think I hate the state of West Virginia and its people. My family thinks so. They call me Miss Lydia or Lydia Alexis when they feel that I’m being snotty. They think I hate them all. Some of them are right.
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via AXS
A Song For My Voice: A Non-Binary Survivor Speaks Up
To have a deep voice and to be assigned female at birth is to be monstrous.
It happened in the first grade, first.
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A Daughter of Hemingway
My mother once told me that young girls who live without their fathers always seek a father. First we seek our real father, sometimes we seek our spiritual father second, but always we search for a father. I have learned that you cannot pin the word father to a man’s jacket and expect him to remember to answer to the title or even to wear the jacket. Uncles and grandfathers have stood in line for me to pin a title to and all have failed. So why not pin the title to a man I never met? One I’ll never meet.
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Matthieu Bourel
How to Be a Duplicitous Woman
Wake up one morning and see yourself, really see yourself in a mirror, in a window, in the blackened television screen.
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Self Portrait: Lindsay Wheeler
This picture makes me both a "threat" and deeply human at the same time. It displays a face of what the media calls "mentally unsound," because God forbid we ever give anything less than our best smiles. And so, we exploit our every ability to emotionally vacate; to put on a happy face when all is broken inside. We deserve more self-compassion. Is a picture "worth a thousand words" when it's only an illusion? This picture is worth a thousand more.
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Penguis by Sebastiᾶo Salgado
Description: This photo provokes an image in my mind of the passing of millenia and the relentlessness of the cycles of life.
On Black & White Photography & a Memory
I have always been drawn to black and white photos more so than color. I know the basics of color theory: black is the reflection of no color and white is the reflection of all colors and the colors we perceive are a matter of how much of the color present in light is reflected versus how much is absorbed. But theory does not help me answer these aesthetic questions: What is the appeal of black and white photography? How do photos, whether in black and white or color, relate to the stories we tell ourselves about the world?
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