Elli

“PRAYER FOR P- (excerpt)

I’ll claim cartographer’s liberties. I’ll claim
omissions for the greater good. I am grateful
my imagination has been drafted for the greater good,
especially since what I mean to do is direct. I want to

be your guide. In those unknown parts, they drew danger- sea scorpions,
enormous octopi, leviathan- but also wonders, rising suns. The open sea is just that,
open. My dictionary has sixty-four definitions for the word open,
none of them defining how I feel now, my heart

a little more open because without her,
not the memory of her, the knowledge, not the insubstantial
decoys my mind sets up in lieu of her, but without the woman,

friend, her embodied body, without her this space is a little more
open…those old map makers wanted us to want,
almost as much as they wanted us to fear,
to get to the places beyond the places we know. This is the way,
how we have always found more.”
― Camille T. Dungy, Smith Blue

“Do not mourn over the happiness you were fortunate enough to possess, lest you turn that joy into grief. Be glad that you had what others may never in their lives experience. The gods have dealt kindly with you, Daughter.”
― Kate Elliott, Child of Flame

“It’s the beating of my heart.
The way I lie awake, playing with shadows slowly climbing up my wall. The gentle moonlight slipping through my window and the sound of a lonely car somewhere far away, where I long to be too, I think. It’s the way I thought my restless wandering was over, that I’d found whatever I thought I had found, or wanted, or needed, and I started to collect my belongings. Build a home. Safe behind the comfort of these four walls and a closed door.
Because as much as I tried or pretended or imagined myself as a part of all the people out there,
I was still the one locking the door every night.
Turning off the phone and blowing out the candles so no one knew I was home.
’cause I was never really well around the expectations of my personality
and I wanted to keep to myself.
and because I haven’t been very impressed lately.
By people,
or places.
Or the way someone said he loved me and then slowly changed his mind.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving

“Overhead there lies an uninterrupted ocean of delicate blue whose expanses are freely coursed by majestic white behemoths quietly sailing to distant horizons. And under our feet there are listless expanses of emerald-green brilliantly splashed by the golden pigment of a thousand dandelions. And to stand in unbridled awe of both is to miss neither, for to miss such things is to miss life itself.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough