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317d5cd
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Maybe if everyone walked around being in touch with each other's hidden pain it could work out and even be beautiful, but it doesn't feel safe to be the only compassionate person on the planet.
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Michelle Tea |
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37ca8b0
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you are right where you should be / now act like it
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Michelle Tea |
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b70bcd5
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and give me insults, give me economic discrimination, give me the darkened parking lot of a windowless queer bar, give me fleets of bigots and books banned in libraries across america, feed the world with lies about my life and plop a second
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Michelle Tea |
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0b116c9
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i wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.
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Michelle Tea |
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52a2f52
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The horror of knowing someone and living with them and even thinking you're lucky and then wham and now you know that every person is really two people and how can you ever know what the other half is up to.
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Michelle Tea |
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d4f094c
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Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown. -- Thea Hillman, "Dear Kath After" from the anthology "
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pain
sorrow
thea-hillman
michelle-tea
humility
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Clint Catalyst Michelle Tea Thea Hillman |
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dde686b
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Remember when i slept with my head in a puddle at your feet? It was humility, or atonement. later your ankle was a pillow and finally you pulled me up and in my sleep i placed your hand above my heart,
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Michelle Tea |
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d46fa26
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Gwynn, she was always talking about wanting to be drunk and honestly I did want to encourage that, I wanted to go to a bar with her and let all the stuff sobriety pushed down be released so I could catch it in my palms and finally kiss her. She was just so sad. Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.
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sobriety
emotion
love
melancholy
longing
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Michelle Tea |
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59f9eca
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She didn't know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn't know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful.
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love
queer-lit
queer-subculture
queer
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Michelle Tea |
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429ca41
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i was really into communal living and we were all / such free spirits, crossing the country we were / nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class....and it's just so cool / how none of th..
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poetry
prostitution
poetry-quotes
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Michelle Tea |
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e46ec94
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You would have to forget everything that came out of her mouth in order to later enjoy it on your cock.
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Michelle Tea |
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c5742fe
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She wouldn't have sex with me in public bathrooms. Little things like this haunted me. I was only twenty-five.
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Michelle Tea |
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7348c85
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I felt old. Again. It had been happening a lot lately. I did not live the life of an old lady, but I could hear it beckoning to me, like a mermaid on a rock." -- Michelle Tea, "Paris: A Lie"
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anthology
clint-catalyst
editors
experimental
first-person-narrative
lgbt-literature
michelle-tea
queer
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Clint Catalyst and MIchelle Tea |
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5720350
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She broke my heart, so now I have to write about her forever. It made everything different. It's something that can only happen once.
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true-love
relationships
romance
love
lesbian
lesbian-romance
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Michelle Tea |
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120eba7
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So I kept talking because nothing gets me going like knowing I should shut up. Oh, I should be quiet and full of potential like all those still flowers, but I know I am a weed and I've got to blow my seeds around the garden.
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Michelle Tea |
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a13880b
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I felt pure the way you feel after you vomit, kind of light and strangely holy, like having taken a sauna in hell.
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Michelle Tea |
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192d7da
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It is so hard for a queer person to become an adult. Deprived of the markers of life's passage, they lolled about in a neverland dreamworld. They didn't get married. They didn't have children. They didn't buy homes or have job-jobs. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.
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pansexual
queerness
queer
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Michelle Tea |
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bb19684
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Being cast out of society early on made you see civilization for the farce it was, a theater of cruelty you were free to drop out of. Instead of playing along you became a fuckup. It was a political statement and a survival skill.
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Michelle Tea |
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b19e1a5
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You can't let the apocalypse rule your life.
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Michelle Tea |
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6611a63
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By the time I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing my dreams. I was reading--and therefore writing--adventure stories. This was before I'd read Isak Dinesen and Mikhail Bulgakov, before Ernest Hemingway and T. Coraghessan Boyle, before I'd read something and really felt it, when writing was still just a compulsion, and my teen-age brain was only bordering on sentience. I filled pages of white space with swas..
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writing
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Téa Obreht |
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3cbf5b5
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They were living exciting, crazy, queer lives full of poetry and camaraderie and heart-seizing crushes. I mean, not that night, but generally. That night they were bored.
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Michelle Tea |
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4a543bc
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I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse.
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individuality
independence
strength
personhood
strength-of-character
individualism
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Michelle Tea |
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7699241
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Why were we tortured? We were in love and life was a fast current swarming around our ankles, threatening to topple us into the wet part of the planet. It was intense, that's why we were tortured. It was enormous and exploding like palm tree. Iris was my Yuri-G, my Delilah, my Stella Marie. Strong dark women you had to love with a strong dark heart that throbbed in gorgeous pain because love is terrible. I mean, ultimately. It would go away..
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Michelle Tea |
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157567d
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The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you're happy is a sham. I didn't even want to be happy anymore because I'd rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I
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Michelle Tea |
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ebd8125
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Oh my God, Michelle thought, I think we're making love. It was a term everyone barfed at. No one wanted to make love, people wanted to fuck, to take each other's skin apart with knives and pin it back together with needles.
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love
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Michelle Tea |
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b4a8ce4
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Andrea worked to harden herself to the onslaught of feelings. The problem with feelings was, first you had one, which was generally bad enough. But then you had a feeling about your feeling, and then a feeling about how you were feeling about your feeling, and then another feeling would pop up at the sight of it all, this teetering pyramid of emotion, and all of it would look wrong to Andrea, all her feeling somehow incorrect, too much or t..
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Michelle Tea |
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18e1986
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One would think that having grown up broke would make one desperate for financial stability, eager to rest in the economic security of a good job. Rather, it gave me the freedom to take chances. I knew how to get by on next to nothing.
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Michelle Tea |
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5a72ee1
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So, go to Paris. If you can't do that, go somewhere. Take a road trip, a train trip, a bus trip if you must. Find a place that reminds you that the world is so much bigger than your heart and whoever broke it this time around. Go hang out by the ocean and trip out on its mammoth ancientness. Offer it your heartache--it's big enough to hold it, to dilute it with all that salt and water, melt it away to nothing. Salt purifies. Take a dunk if ..
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Michelle Tea |
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457c6a4
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Our lives make awesome stories, especially if you don't get too attached to the thread of your own narrative.
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Michelle Tea |
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2285997
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I wanted her so badly, my heart hung out of my chest like some hound-dog's tongue, pant, pant.
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Michelle Tea |
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cd4a9fa
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Melancholy was a fleshy wave permanently cresting on her face, she had to speak through it when she talked.
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Michelle Tea |
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dfc929c
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This mouth had kissed me so much it had worn its own grooves into my teeth. It was like settling into the armchair that fit exactly the round of your body, only it was incredibly exciting because everything was different now, and it was horribly wrong to be kissing. It would only prolong everything. I sat there in the bus shelter, back up against the glass, hoping the bug would never come. Desperation is the sexiest emotion.
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Michelle Tea |
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c49563c
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To have someone know you so thoroughly and not want you. Is there anything more painful?
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Michelle Tea |
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04b2e96
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Coming of queer age in the 1990s, to love queers was to love damage. To love damage was a path to loving yourself. ...Queers do not come out of the minefield of homophobia without scars. We do not live through out families' rejection of us, our stunted life options, the violence we've faced, the ways in which we've violated ourselves for survival, our harmful coping mechanisms, our lifesaving delusions, the altered brain chemistry we have s..
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love
queer
pride
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Michelle Tea |
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6cef632
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She kissed her like she'd been stranded on an island, notching each stranded day onto a fallen coconut, slowly losing her mind. She filled Michelle like weather, worked her mouth like a cherry stem being tongued into a knot.
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Michelle Tea |
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0200c80
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The messed-up queers Michelle ran with tempted fate daily, were creating a new way to live, new templates for everything - life, death, beauty, aging, art.
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Michelle Tea |
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c78d0d5
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She was magnificent. She wasn't so much a person as an event, a gigantic presence.
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Michelle Tea |
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2b0c6ad
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She was just so sad. Her whole face hung with it, like sadness was her personal gravity.
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Michelle Tea |
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befb055
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Am I in an abusive relationship? Because even though Fake Johnny Depp's torments were never physical, they made me feel so completely unhinged that I actually hit myself. Nothing slams the self-esteem like hitting your own freaking self. This was the cycle of violence I found myself in, due in no small part to the heady effects of
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Michelle Tea |
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aeb8e64
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Nearly all the queers Michelle knew were fuckups in one way or another.
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Michelle Tea |
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abb3678
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On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches
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Michelle Tea |
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ecb17de
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You can't get lost if you have nowhere to be.
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Michelle Tea |
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f93a545
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Did anyone think this canon of druggie men were out of control? Only in the most admirable of ways! Out of control like a shaman or a space explorer, like a magician sawing himself in half. Out of control like a poet.
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men
magician
shaman
space
explorer
poet
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Michelle Tea |
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1164226
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Older Fags and Younger Fags, Like Legally Young. Daddies. Zeus and Ganymede. Ziggy schooled her. Yeah, You Were There, Michelle retorted, On Mount Olympus. You Were Working the Door. You Carded Ganymede.
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olympus
zeus
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Michelle Tea |