Braided Tales

“We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don’t share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.”

C. JoyBell C. (via jaegerjaques)
(via embrasai)

1 month ago/53 notes/REBLOG

nedhepburn:
This one time I painted a living room with a girl.
This was a handful of years back. It was about eight months before the huge, flame-out of a breakup. That day, though? That day we painted the living room? It was pretty uneventful. We painted my parents living room for $50 between us and a pizza. That was it. I think we watched Anchorman or something after that.
But it still holds as on of the most indelible memories I have. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not still in love, it happened, it was good, it ended, and we’ve both moved on. But I’ll never forget that day. Because it’s never, in the long run, about the grand gestures. You can fly across the world and show up on her doorstep with a rose in your teeth and a ring in a little velvet box but I can guarantee you that - more often than not - she’s going to remember the time you built the birdhouse in the back yard, or what have you, a whole lot more.
Life wasn’t meant to be taken in large movements. The next day will inevitably arrive, you’ll sleep, and the moment will have passed. But when you have a hundred thousand small moments, you can step back and appreciate the picture a lot more than metaphorically blowing your load on some grand moment that, in all honesty, look, you’re not Bruce Fucking Springsteen, you’re not going to be able to blow everyone’s mind every single night. You’re not Romeo and/or Juliet. There’s no reason to drink the poison together in some flame-out gesture. So that leaves us with the small stuff. It’s all about the detail.
That’s what love is. Attention to detail.
And the moment will end. And then things will get boring. And it might get a little quiet. And it might all end horribly. And you might hate eachother at the end. And you might walk away from eachother one day and never speak again. But that’s just how it goes.
But she’ll remember the time you held the door open for her on your first date.She’ll remember the time you laughed at her impression of the landlady.She’ll remember the time you stayed up all night that first time. She’ll remember the small things a lot longer than the big ones.
But everything ends. And I’ll tell you why you have to make the small things, the small moments count so much more:
One day, probably a while longer from now, when old age takes ahold of someone, she might just only remember your smile. Everything you ever did together, every second, every moment, every beat, every morning spent in bed, every evening spent together on the sofa, all of that - gone. Everything you ever did will be reduced to the head of a pin. She won’t remember your name. She’ll just remember your smile, and she’ll smile. She won’t know why. It’s a base, gut reaction. But she’ll smile, uncontrollably, and it will come from somewhere so deep as to know that you touched her on a primal, honest, and true level that no scientist, scholar, or savant could ever begin to explain. There is no more. There is nothing else. There is just this: She’ll remember your smile, and she’ll smile.
And you know what? That’s all that really matters in the end.

2 months ago/50,189 notes/REBLOG

Joseph Campbell (via jaegerjaques)
(via embrasai)

2 months ago/2 notes/REBLOG

4 months ago/2,338 notes/REBLOG

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (via ilhawa)
(via embrasai)

4 months ago/21 notes/REBLOG

4 months ago/REBLOG

That night, the lights shone like tactile crystals. From the ring I bought for 25 cents out of a machine.

They were new and fake, full of artificial attraction.

Filling my pores, and frothing beside the chilled darkness, taken in with my cigarette.

Sometimes a city is too big for one picture.

All the streets crossed and crissed between homes and homeless. The blurry lights pinballing through glass and road paint.

My eyes are inhaling too much.

Overwhelming, at best.

But the silence is not deafening, for I can hear the hum of my city.

The audible thump of a beat, a beat…

A beat.

Ferociously pumping blood through every couldesac and alleyway it fills, regurgitating life through the cracks in every square of side I walk.

It beats for the drunks, the drunks and the gas stations they inhabit.

It beats for the 24 hour walmarts and the marts only open to those who are payed well above the minimum.

It beats for the soccer moms, and the step moms, and little girls pretending to the be the moms they wish they had.

And these beats, these rythmic sways, reach clear up the canyons,

smearing the skies through the molded peaks of our protective outer shell.

We’re safe here.

Safe to live in the heart.

The heart that will never stop…

Beating.