there is beauty in the mundane. life doesn’t have to be constantly adventurous and excting to be fun or worth living. there’s beauty in spending a saturday baking cookies and reading a good book. there’s beauty in taking a hot shower after a hard day. there’s beauty in ordering pizza and watching a movie with your best friend. these things are just as worthwhile as travelling the world or skydiving. you’re allowed to appreciate small joy, as well as big joy. you’ll be happier for it.
a word of advice: open your windows. wash your sheets. exfoliate your legs. read a paperback. make your bed. moisturize every inch of your body. go to sleep with soft skin and sheets that smell like the wind and a mind full of words worth dreaming about
i’m so thankful we’re alive to smell flowers and touch saltwater and get chilled in the breeze and take deep breaths and make foods warm with love and dance and laugh and move and wake up and dig our hands in dirt and eat strawberries and draw mindlessly and remember and sing and joke and walk down the same street again and again and make meaning. we are so lucky we get to be and feel and keep going
suddenly remembered this poem as i was making breakfast this morning & frantically googled “poem remembered to buy eggs?????????” & somehow managed to find it & it utterly knocked the wind out of me just as much as when i first read it
It feels enormous that we live in a world where almost every person has a story where they or someone they know - just… Does something beautiful. For no real reason beyond empathy, all the time, people do these tiny heroic acts. They pay for the person behind them or hold a hand or talk a stranger through a panic attack. Often these are stories without reciprocated love - just someone being good and kind for no other reason than because it is right to be good and kind. They just do the right thing, over and over, and teach their children to do the right thing over and over. And love just … Whispers. And it ghosts over us. And little good keeps happening.
In Uzbek we have this concept of the divine dark, the darkness from which all things came. So there’s this idea that shows up in a lot of our literature that when the world was first made it was like a gentle night, peaceful, quiet and pitch-black. The night is when creation started and the night is when you’re closest to glimpsing what it was like at the very start of the world.
Can we please stop associating being a good person with how much you’re willing to suffer in silence for other people? You can be a kind person and still say “no, I don’t have the time/energy to help you with that.” You can be a kind person and still say “this makes me uncomfortable, please stop.” You can be a kind person and still say “I disagree and here’s why.” You can be kind and still say “I’m not okay with this.” Being kind is about treating people with kindness and respect, not about being the human equivalent of a doormat!
i really like to imagine myself way older with more lines around my eyes and mouth and holding my current self very tight and kissing the top of my head and saying “I know” on and on and on and on while current me is crying and older me is holding me tighter and tighter and I just sob in her arms. i really know this is fleeting life is fleeting moments are fleeting very very small things that happen and just fly away as fast as they came but bc of how the brain is wired it feels like it’ll last forever and there is no escape. i know 40 and 50 year old me will want to hold me the same way i find myself wanting to hold 10 or 5 or 16 year old me. i truly need to do better for me, i really need to stop torturing myself. i also wonder what will be my smell, the same way my mother always smells like Orange blossom water and honey but also rosewater, i wonder what i Will smell like, i wonder what will my kids or nephews say to me, what they see in me, what they want to tell me they can’t tell their own parents.
Looking through old photos and I found one of my junior homecoming dance. It was the night after my dad’s funeral. My friend who’d stayed with me the entire week, in my bed, through all the tears, made me get out of bed that night. She pulled my shirt up over my head and told me to get in the shower. She washed my hair for me. She curled it. She rubbed foundation onto my face, lined my eyes, and put me in my dress.
She contacted my other friends who were feeling awkward and unsure of what to do and told them the party was still on, to meet at my house for photos before the dance.
They all showed up, and I went to the dance, and we all screamed and cried, and I took my first step to healing.
I haven’t spoken to that girl in five years. Nothing happened. I moved away. She fell in love. We grew apart and into our own lives.
It’s strikes me how beautiful the ephermeral nature of teenage friendships can be.
We may not need each other now, but there was a time when I needed her more than anyone. And sometimes she needed me.
And the universe put us together just then. Just when it was most important. Not a year too late or too soon. The same town, the same school, the same classroom where we could meet. Right when it mattered.
We come and go from people’s lives every day, and along the way we may get a chance to love someone fully, just for a little while.
