April. So Long.
Tag: literature
The Heart of It All
when i was a lot younger, i wanted to write pocket-size books that are so portable that you can carry anywhere with you. you can have it while you have your coffee in the morning, in your commute, in between meetings, and late at night when you can’t seem to fall asleep.
you can have it when you feel a slight discomfort from today’s misfortunes, when you’re lonely and feeling alone, when you’re filled with sadness but also when you’re ebullient with joy and gratitude, when you see the sun rises in the first morning in april. my words with you there, and everywhere.
we will never have to feel alone again. we will always have each other to listen and care. we will have that april sun shining down on us, the wonder of things, the heart of it all.
when something rips out of the ground —dandelion, garlic, an entire life, there should be a minute when things are allowed to be raw.
let the earth still clip the roots. let the root be pulp and wet and indeterminate. uncertain.
the rushing, always, to replant, to make meaning, to say aloud: this has made me, as if movement away from pain is the only moral posture.
what we need most, really, is inertia: to lie within the bruise to see its colours changing overtime without putting any word on it. to be permitted a dull, unproductive grief that does not serve a future lesson.
i have been in rooms with people who wanted an arc sooner than i could give it. who are you now? what did you learn?
honestly? i am not ready for the new sobriquet. i refuse to be within the tyranny of usefulness.
i want to sleep and then start awaking, without the internal wobble that follows. let it be uncertain, for once. let’s not name it anything other than nothing.
there is tenderness in not naming everything immediately. there is relief in being allowed to be messy, to carry weight for a while without being judged for not having done enough with it.
i would make it mandatory that after anything that breaks you, there is at least one stretched week—one small, sacred river-of-minutes—where you cannot be called anything other than the person who is still, quietly mending. without expectations. only the simple, radical work of not needing to mean anything yet.
Sontag once said that interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art, that to interpret is to impoverish.
the same can be said of pain: to over-interpret it, to rush it into symbols, is to impoverish the real. to let go, in this Sontagian sense, is to resist the pressure of metaphor and instead inhabit the raw, unclassified minute. without neither sobriquet, nor emblem. just the difficult, ordinary fact of being here.
and perhaps that is the only kind of survival worth naming. it resists the language that would make them exemplary. it lingers, holding open the right not to be defined.
with that in mind, you are everything you need to be.
the universe inside, this wholeness, this warmth, is meant to be shared.
the act of reaching out, overcoming shame, loneliness, resisting the system that alienates us all, are the very essence of survival. it’s peak humanity.
there’s an epidemic of loneliness that starves us in rapid proportions, and we might be able to do something about it.
i’d like to take part, however small, in fighting it, surviving it. i deeply believed we need to keep grounding ourselves in nature and in each other. we have to try. we have to create space to grieve, to nurture joy, to have each other.
when was the last time you had a conversation that felt loving, that was pouring into your cup, that gave you a breath of fresh air? let’s have one today.
©2025 maiadiaries.uk, all rights reserved.
Het Verdriet van België
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Time Is Not Going Anywhere
What I Know Now
Tell No One
There’s too much loneliness in this world, and around me. If only I could slice up my heart real nice and evenly, I would share it with everyone I knew so they would feel less lonely.
I would tell Father, I’d always be around and he could have all of me. I would tell Grampy, I was proud to have his eyes and his kindness. His wisdom ran in my blood. I would tell brother, he could share with me his love for Mother and the burden of existence never have to fall on his shoulder, I would carry it with him.
I have so much loneliness in me, so much more than I could bear. Mother gave it to me one night the first time she was standing on the ledge near the window in our thirty stories high three bedrooms flat. She was in love with heights, so every night she took the dragons out and played with them outside by the window. She’d learn to fly. And fall.
I got so lonely every time she did, for this grave feeling seeping through my skin, that she would fly (or fall) and would never find her way back to me (and Father). She had certain ways of seeing life and death. Most of the time, to her there was no difference in both. But at times she saw death as a release, and life was a cage in which one could only see what was not and could never feel what was real. What was real she saw in dreams.
She shared these dreams with me. She wrote them in a diary. Tell no one, she said to me.
In her dreams, I was born into her world. I was her.
Read more here.
©️2019 All rights reserved.
Late Poems
the human heart is not exactly bright red.
it is dusk-lit and moth-bitten,
the colour of traffic at rush hour,
of midnight soup gone cold on the stove,
of pass-midnight texts,
and letters written too late
then folded again and again,
creased in pockets like timelines
we forgot to live.
the heart speaks in pulses.
the body answers in static.
i wrote you letters i didn’t send.
then i did. then i lost track
of the version i meant to send.
the heart does that too.
it remembers only the most recent rewrite
for something as soft as memory.
i knew, the way the body knows
the weather of someone else’s motion
some dreams don’t start as dreams.
they arrive like postcards from another life:
i am in a storm.
i am the storm.
i am running.
i am you.
in dreams,
everything means everything,
but only in the way
the heart means when it flinches
when we’re not in dreams,
our bodies unsure what to do with themselves.
my memory: a black sea.
my heart: a clock without hands.
the heart echoes a truth so deep
it sounds like a secret.
sometimes it grows quiet
like the air before a storm.
sometimes, it doesn’t stop.
and maybe we used to be one person.
split by time.
maybe that’s why your pain shows up
in my limbs.
because
the heart is not a metaphor.
it’s the thing that is still moving
after everything else
gives up.
from my hearts. ©️all rights reserved.
Kindness Makes Me Go Ah
Kindness grows teeth sometimes, but they’re made of sugar. They melt when you look at them too long. I hold one on my tongue until it disappears, and I think, this is what it means to care for something that doesn’t belong to you.
The clover keeps multiplying behind my eyes. I blink and it’s a meadow. I blink again and it’s a mirror. In it, I see myself saying ah, like I’ve just remembered a song I use to sing before I knew what words were.
Love isn’t for building or breaking or even keeping warm. It’s a cloud that doesn’t know it’s raining. It drifts into your mouth, and you swallow it, and then you have to learn to speak gently, because the cloud lives there now.
I think the beluga is still swimming, even when I stop believing in oceans. I think kindness swims, too — it loops around, forgets its name, finds it again in someone’s half-asleep voice. I think we go ah not because it’s easy, but because something inside us wants to be touched without being asked why.
And maybe that’s the whole idea— not for love, not for anything, really — just for the quiet sound of ah, soft as breath, soft as forgiveness, soft as learning to stay.
Kindness leans against the door as if it knows I am still learning to hold things without owning them.
Some days, my want grows wings. My want doesn’t go far, but it keeps trying. It circles the clover, small and dizzy, the way love circles us — shy, relentless, pretending not to care.
The beluga rises again in my mind. I imagine her exhaling a silver thread that ties the whole ocean together — my heart, your hands, the moon’s tired shoulder. All of it shimmering and infinite.
I think that’s what softness means — it’s willing. Willing to dissolve, to laugh in the middle of crying, to open your palms and let the meadow grow wild.
I keep saying ah, a small devotion, a secret handshake with the world. Ah for the clover. Ah for the sugar. Ah for the breath that stays kind, even when no one’s listening.
*this is a copyrighted work and is part of my book.
I Will Know to Wait For You
my dearest, my love,
Ultimately,
we will lose each other to something. I would hope for grand circumstance – death or disaster.
But it might not be that way at all.
It might be that you walk out one morning after making love… and never return, or I fall in love with another man.
It might be a slow drift into indifference.
Either way, we’ll have to learn to bear the weight of the eventuality that we will lose each other to something.
So why not begin now, while your head rests like a perfect moon in my lap, and the dogs on the beach are howling?
Why not reach for the seam…, just a little, so the falling can begin?
Because later, when we cross each other on the streets, and are forced to look away,
when we’ve thrown the disregarded pieces of our togetherness into bedroom drawers and the smell of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet decay of lilies —
what will we call it, when it’s no longer love?
Tishani Doshi
dogs
As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.
Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.
And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.
a real realist
with a real tale to tell
and a real tail to tell it with
But now, my bark a ghost in this strange scentless air
I am no growling cicerone or cerberus,
But wreckage for the pound, snuffling in shame
Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this.
As for his talk, well, I took no special notice.
His love of the war poets was well known.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti | Weldon Kees | August Kleinzahler
If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait
all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you
must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one
of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and
low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak,
you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they
will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or
someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to
speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel
you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit,
or placed behind a door—this will depend on what kind of a dog you
want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though
you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn
to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You
must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string,
or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once
you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better
to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not—
a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to
love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much
as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but
never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your
children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity;
you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how
to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk
enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show
your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog,
you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.
Soulmates
My soulmates are scattered all over the world, lost and shivering, cold and alone, or happy and warm, laughing and dancing, but still longing for me.
My soulmates are scratching and clawing to get closer to me, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively, sometimes without even knowing what they’re doing.
My soulmates are climbing up tiny blades of grass, anxious for a glimpse of my boots plowing through the green tangle, ready to grip the edges of my pants and climb, climb, climb to their destinies.
My soulmates can’t wait to bury their heads in my neck, breathe in my scent and then shove their entire heads under my skin and drink my red hot blood.
My soulmates say “Turn yourself into a tasty roast beef sub so I can eat it standing up in the middle of my living room.”
My soulmates say, “Send me strands of your hair in the mail with a note attached, handwritten, something about how you want me to clip your toenails and shampoo your carpets and clean out your gutters for centuries to come.”
My soulmates can’t stop thinking about me, even when they’re tumbling around in the dryer or drifting above the ground with their friends, waiting for the pressure to change.
My soulmates want more of me, more more more. They want to rain down on my head or keep the sunshine off my back. They just need to be closer. Everything bad about me is good to them.
“Every word you write belongs in a book,” they whisper as I’m typing another worthless newsletter post. “No one could ever tire of your words. Make yourself into a ham biscuit so I can rub it all over my face.”
My soulmates love me exactly as I am: the absolute worst, hot blood pulsing relentlessly through my unguarded neck, tangles of impossibly frizzy hair to climb, the stench of too much work and worry floating like a dark cloud around my head.
My soulmates wish there was more of me to go around. They know I have an ant bite or a tick bite on my neck that itches. They know I woke up at 4 am and wondered, “Ant or tick, ant or tick? Tick bites normally don’t sting. When I swatted at my neck, there was a crumpled black ant there.
My soulmates know I’m awful but that’s what they crave the most, my awfulness. They’ve longed for my terrible company for what feels like centuries. Of course I’ll be a big disappointment. That’s the whole point, that’s what makes it so romantic in the first place.
My soulmates want me to know that the things I consider romantic aren’t just empty novelties, reasons to work too hard for nothing, excuses to scrape and claw up a blade of grass, into the executive suite, across a continent, doomed from start to finish. … You smell like precious metals, you taste like springtime, you make me laugh until my tongue falls out.
My soulmates can’t get closer to me. They waste all day climbing one blade of grass and I never even walk by, or they write entire books about me that I never read.
They hum little love songs that they’ll never record because there’s just too much feeling there, or they daydream about me while spending most of their time with people they don’t like that much, doing jobs they don’t enjoy, wishing everything were different.
Don’t do that, I try to tell them. Be awful instead, and see who shows up. Your entire world is packed with soulmates and you don’t even know it. It ends up sounding so condescending when I say these things, but my soulmates love it when I condescend to them. It makes them growl and whine.
But I mean, look at me. Terrible. Pulling grass out of the driveway and then sitting there, shaking the dirt off the grass and scattering worms and mud all over my clothes with the solemn reverence of a priest swinging an incense burner through the aisles of a cathedral.
Or dancing in my ugly kitchen first thing in the morning, as if I believe that I’m a supernatural being who owns the sun and the moon and the stars.
No one can fuck with my good life. Nothing’s gonna bring me down. Nothing’s gonna change my world.
from Heather Havrilesky
the knowing, the plot that calls me to live
the me to your me time
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hope
If I could survive here, with these simple wants, I’d be happy.
I just want to listen to music, read books, eat food, drink beer & occasionally whiskey, dance, and travel, see my friends & spend my time with you.
Last day of April. Early morning sun, open windows & birdsong. Saturday quiet as the city sleeps in. Momentary stillness.
A cup of coffee & a book equals peace.
At least right now. The temporariness of it all doesn’t matter. True spring on the horizon.
The mistake of placing hope in seasons, to look forward to the days to come & expect things to be better.
Gina Myers
a quiet love story
We have not long to love.
Light does not stay.
The tender things are those we fold away.
Intimate the silence, dim and warm.
I could but did not, reach to touch your arm.
I could, but do not, break that which is still.
(Almost the faintest whisper would be shrill.)
Yet whenever I turn
To your gray eyes over me,
It is as though I looked
For the first time at the sea.
Tennessee Williams | Sarah Teasdale
i did a thing!
lights above the sea
The sky’s white with November’s teeth, and the air is ash and woodsmoke.
A flush of color from the dying tree, a cargo train speeding through, and there, that’s me, standing in the wintering grass watching the dog suffer the cold leaves.
I’m not large from this distance, just a fence post, a hedge of holly.
How my own body, empty, clean of secrets, knows how to carry her, knows we were all meant for something.
to look down on my own body and know that falling would mean dying not just once but many times
to fall for a million years like a flute falls, musically, played by the air it is passing through
and to land with no mind, but with a heart that was breaking
#leonardospoetry
when i began to write, it was out of fear. i thought i might forget, or pretend to forget, or pretend to pretend,
or grow up
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the
sea—
A poem should not mean
But be
the only way out is in, or through
You are struggling to remember a lengthy quote about loneliness when you feel an unfamiliar pain in your abdomen, like some previously dormant animal inside you is stretching… You think that perhaps you will never feel sadder than you do right now, and the enormity and romance of the thought bring you some comfort… is there anything more worthless than exhaustive remembering? what good has it done you?
Tennis Lessons | Susannah Dickey
Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk forward into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on trees… I need clean new people who associate me with fun. This is my number two problem: I am never satisfied with what I have. It goes hand in hand with my number one problem: rushing. Maybe they aren’t so much hand in hand as two hands of the same beast. Maybe they are my hands; I am the beast.
No One Belongs Here More Than You | Miranda July
Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.
I don’t know why we are here either, but whatever the answers, I’m back with Engels in 1844. We’re not here to be regarded only ‘as useful objects’.
Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return.
Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal | Jeanette Winterson
I would like to fall in love again but my only hope is that love doesn’t happen to me so often after this. I don’t want to get so used to falling in love that I get curious to experience something more extreme—whatever that may be.
Back on TV there were pictures of whooping cranes doing a mating dance and they were so sweet and graceful I thought, “If only I could be a whooping crane and was able to float and fly like them, then it would be like always being in love.”
And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened.
As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve learned that there is not much I, or anyone can do… After a while you understand the way that things can go wrong in people’s lives; you learn all the patterns and the temptations; you recognize the ways people use other people.
The glamour of corruption disappears; the learning is no fun anymore. You don’t want to waste the energy, so instead you learn tolerance, and compassion and love—and distance—and these are hard words for me to say. All of this is hard for me to say.
Life After God | Douglas Coupland
Human beings didn’t live beyond a hundred because they simply weren’t up for it. Psychologically, I mean. You kind of ran out. There wasn’t enough self to keep going. You grew too bored of your own mind. Of the way life repeated itself. How, after a while, there wasn’t a smile or gesture that you hadn’t seen before. There wasn’t a change in the world order that didn’t echo other changes in the world order. And the news stopped being new. The very word ‘news’ became a joke. It was all just a cycle. A slowly rotating downward one. And your tolerance for human beings, making the same mistakes over and over and over and over again, began to fade. It was like being stuck in the same song, with a chorus you had once liked but now made you want to rip your ears off.
How To Stop Time | Matt Haig
Nothing brings more anxiety than Rilke’s avowal that a person who feels he can live without writing shouldn’t be writing at all.
Must I write? is the question he commands the student to ask himself in the most silent hour of your night. If you were forbidden to write, would you die?
What we miss—what we lose and what we mourn—isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.
The Friend | Sigrid Nunēz
We can never know what to want,
because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Einmal ist keinmal… What happens but once… might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being | Milan Kundera
i dream[t] one night that i was God. the whole world was at my disposal and the whole mankind. with one stroke of my hand, worlds would shiver and break,
and with another worlds would spring from the air. i was a man alone playing with Time. people were my toys and the world was my playground. people scheming below, trying to dissect life and death
and knowing nothing. there was no Heaven and no Hell. Heaven is held out as a kind of sugarplum after medicine, Hell as a scrouge if you rebel. i created several worlds
in order to see which one was best. in one people were only born once in a hundred years, and they only died once in a hundred years, and their births and deaths
were felt all over the world. the people lived as one great family. but were they real? and what was i? was everything a dream, but who were the dreamers? so i wondered
in my dream, and the only solution i could find was by waking, and finding myself a person.
Hyde Park Gate News | Virginia Woolf
turn off your phones. read 🩶
clumsy
I will wait and wait and wait, feeling overwhelmed, but keeping hope grit between my teeth.
It’s as if those last few cold nights hold a stronger gravity than the rest of the year. The trees are without their waving welcome.
The snowbanks shrug in their sloping indifference. Nothing outside wants to be touched.
And when I can’t go roll around in the dirt or sleep under the quiet chirp of stars or throw my naked body into chilled lake waves or hike until my breath thins in the pink happy of my lungs,
all my thinking folds in on itself.
tapeworm
everything i put inside of myself somehow
ends up
inside
of you
instead
& so you grow
& i
shrink
& don’t notice
until
my best
friend
draws
me
from
the side just by
running
a fine-tipped pen down a sheet of white paper.
you walk into a house & swallow all of the
furniture.
i fell
in love
with you at parties.
when you laughed
at my jokes, the sound lived
inside of me
for weeks.
i can’t tell the
difference between
my
thoughts & your voice.
my intestines & you.
how is it possible that you are both my joy
& the taker of it?
i told you that when i’m sad
i do not eat.
& i let the forks turn to rust.
you came to the door with sinking
eyes & a dry tongue
& begged me to
put something
inside
of myself to make
you fat
again,
you said,
send me a picture of every meal & another of your clean plate.
i said,
okay okay okay i will.
& so i boiled some
spinach
& snapped a photo, then
slid it
into
the dog’s bowl,
walked
to your
apartment & left the bare dish
at
your
feet.
Wherever You Are is Here
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
to live in this world—to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
You Can Have August, and Abundantly So
You can’t have it all…
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green.
—If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so.
You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious—
You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together—
And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will—
—it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this.
how much pain should we invite
How much pain
should we knowingly invite—the gallery says all, and all at once.
Otherwise, why paint or write if not for ends hidden in plain sight?
I watch you disappear into the next room knowing, one day, this room will be my life.
