re: i have started from happiness again
the season where the heat cracks open the seeds
Dear reader,
My labor of love, Glia, is now on the App Store. It helps you sense-make thoughts into stories of self-understanding.
Glia builds the emotional context for your life. It understands you through relationships that define you and tends to the nuanced, long-term memory for your growth. Memory is how we become legible to ourselves over time. You can read more about Glia here.
There are unique stories that live in each one of us. Start Glia-ing them now.
Studying clouds on the hill. Feeling like a real adult. Out of the rabbit hole, no longer too big or small for this world. Knowing one thing or two. The heatwave has tempered the growing pains. Life is just getting good, and I’m getting better at the hard stuff. The standing fan shakes its head back and back. At the cusp of womanhood, we sit across from each other in my living room, our tears rolling down. Drinking your soup. Talking alternative universes where one of us doesn’t exist. Silly, I’m glad this is the only reality I know and know you through.
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The people who can’t see you only see a person doing fine or not fine.
Those who see you (when you happen to be not fine) ask: Do you need me to just be here in silence?
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Love Letter Typewriter by Mineral
Summer unfolded like a tapestry / And you were there as you have always been / There, glowing where the sky meets with the trees / Air softly crowing, singing fears to sleep / Will you ever know how much I love you for that / Will you ever know how much I love you
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"Remember what you wrote to yourself six months ago? Now look at that in the context of all the magical postcards that arrived this week. Look at your progress. Letters, postcards, biography, autobiography — it’s all part of that same tension: first person and third person, two people walking into the same room and seeing it differently. And if I go fully poetic, the key architectural quality of a building is the number of directions the light comes in from. A room with light from one direction is nice. Two directions is better. Three directions is wonderful. Four directions of light is extraordinary. Glia, at its best, lets the light in from multiple directions. It helps you see more clearly. And more directions of light lift the spirit." — Stephen
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What if I tell you nothing ever passes? The only change of scene is our entropic forgetfulness. Orphaned puzzles that’ve lost their big picture with nowhere to put them. I toss away all my deadweight because a living friendship, a living idea, a living ______ makes me feel nothing but alive.
Note: the title “i have started from happiness again” of this letter comes from the poem Untitled Love Poem For… by jason b. crawford.
