It’s the way it lingers in the space between longing and loss, between the weight of history and the ache of what could have been. I feel like I’m always searching for something just out of reach, something that feels like home but never quite is. Similar to O’Connor’s character, I think I understand what it means to carry ghosts and to seek meaning in the ruins.
Mar 11, 2025
Related Recs
I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
May 28, 2025
“To exist in this body is war,” she whispered, her voice so soft it nearly escaped me, as if she recoiled from the weight of the words that had slipped past her lips.
“Every day, I am dissected as if I am the anomaly in this world, not the systems they built upon the backs of those who came before,” she chuckled, as if this truth — this burden — had been her constant companion.
“Looking at her then, perhaps truly seeing her for the first time, the enormity of it struck me. Somewhere between then and now, life’s weariness had etched itself onto her face. Lines I had once interpreted as joy and laughter now seemed more like scars, healed over with a stubborn refusal to be erased, a silent declaration: “This will not break me.” And for a fleeting moment, I had believed it. But now, beneath the willow, where sunlight once filtered through the leaves in a warm embrace, a sense of her depleted fight hung heavy in the air. The light itself felt different now, thin and frail, mirroring how all the blood she had shed seemed to have cost her more than if she had never bled at all….
After the Fire, We Remain, page 30 — P.N.G
May 8, 2025
🍃
a couple months ago I'm out behind the gabled house with dregs of home still seeping through its edges, a sharp sort of newness ripping the seams of who I am & who I was, sweaty fingers slipping from between each other with the bloodied grasp of desperation - it is a spring day, and I am here again. the leaves are new and the blinking infant furled in the strands of my chest takes a breath and every time I trudge through these vine-ridden woods I feel her grubby hands trace the creases in my ribcage. there are ghosts here, the soulmate-friend across the ocean and I and the way we'd take axes to the already-fallen trees like our anger was spraying away with the bark and we were left with only breeze. there are the phantoms of our hands stuck in the mud, ripped leaves beneath our fingernails as we unclogged the flow of the creek and watched the water dig its trenches deeper, and now i'm watching it capture the light of a new year in my hometown alone. through the leaves and over the tinny chorus of water-on-rock I hear the echoes of a mother calling to her children in a game of hide-and-seek, her children laughing, the clamor of it like a memory captured on tape and played back. there is a hole here, radio waves rippling through years folded back and punched through, I a bystander to the reminiscence of a stranger years down the line when some part of that laughter will be lost. it is here. it is here now, in the backyard of a house I sometimes call home.
May 5, 2025
Top Recs from @theccincity
Apr 1, 2025
it’s been a great soundtrack to my writing this month! no skips 🙂↕️☝🏽
Mar 14, 2025
raw, unfiltered explorations of intimacy, desire, and self-discovery…a collection of stories that refuses to dilute Black women’s experiences, embracing both the tenderness and messiness of love!
Mar 12, 2025