Sixteen Small Steps To Happiness by Emma Elseworthy

1. push yourself to get up before the rest of the world - start with 7am, then 6am, then 5:30am. go to the nearest hill with a big coat and a scarf and watch the sun rise.

2. push yourself to fall asleep earlier - start with 11pm, then 10pm, then 9pm. wake up in the morning feeling re-energized and comfortable.

3. erase processed food from your diet. start with no lollies, chips, biscuits, then erase pasta, rice, cereal, then bread. use the rule that if a child couldn’t identify what was in it, you don’t eat it.

4. get into the habit of cooking yourself a beautiful breakfast. fry tomatoes and mushrooms in real butter and garlic, fry an egg, slice up a fresh avocado and squirt way too much lemon on it. sit and eat it and do nothing else.

5. stretch. start by reaching for the sky as hard as you can, then trying to touch your toes. roll your head. stretch your fingers. stretch everything.

6. buy a 1L water bottle. start with pushing yourself to drink the whole thing in a day, then try drinking it twice.

7. buy a beautiful diary and a beautiful black pen. write down everything you do, including dinner dates, appointments, assignments, coffees, what you need to do that day. no detail is too small.

8. strip your bed of your sheets and empty your underwear draw into the washing machine. put a massive scoop of scented fabric softener in there and wash. make your bed in full.

9. organise your room. fold all your clothes (and bag what you don’t want), clean your mirror, your laptop, vacuum the floor. light a beautiful candle.

10. have a luxurious shower with your favourite music playing. wash your hair, scrub your body, brush your teeth. lather your whole body in moisturiser, get familiar with the part between your toes, your inner thighs, the back of your neck.

11. push yourself to go for a walk. take your headphones, go to the beach and walk. smile at strangers walking the other way and be surprised how many smile back. bring your dog and observe the dog’s behaviour. realise you can learn from your dog.

12. message old friends with personal jokes. reminisce. suggest a catch up soon, even if you don’t follow through. push yourself to follow through.

14. think long and hard about what interests you. crime? sex? boarding school? long-forgotten romance etiquette? find a book about it and read it. there is a book about literally everything.

15. become the person you would ideally fall in love with. let cars merge into your lane when driving. pay double for parking tickets and leave a second one in the machine. stick your tongue out at babies. compliment people on their cute clothes. challenge yourself to not ridicule anyone for a whole day. then two. then a week. walk with a straight posture. look people in the eye. ask people about their story. talk to acquaintances so they become friends.

16. lie in the sunshine. daydream about the life you would lead if failure wasn’t a thing. open your eyes. take small steps to make it happen for you.

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много много много азиаток

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something not everyone knows how to love.

you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.


-Warsan Shire

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you're summertime fine, you're wintertime cold

еще лета

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I want to be
the one
you want in your
mind and your gut and
your bathroom.

But I don’t want you
to fuck the whole
world to find out.

Charles Bukowski

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5 centimeters per second

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что может быть лучше

Paul Smith a/w 2011

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"I am summoned by a door
but forgotten by the knock
and left standing here alone
in a long silent hall, like
a marble intestine, that knows
my name."
-Richard Brautigan

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be swept away

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Anne Sexton

I was
the girl of the chain letter,
the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes,
the one of the telephone bills,
the wrinkled photo and the lost connections,
the one who kept saying -
Listen! Listen!
We must never! We must never!
and all those things…

the one
with her eyes half under her coat,
with her large gun-metal blue eyes,
with the thin vein at the bend of her neck
that hummed like a tuning fork,
with her shoulders as bare as a building ,
with her thin foot and her thin toes,
with an old red hook in her mouth,
the mouth that kept bleeding
into the terrible fields of her soul…

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He walked down a busy street
Staring solely at his feet
Clutching pictures of past lovers at his side
Stood at the table where she sat
And removed his hat
In respect of her presence
Presents her with the pictures and says
These are just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you.

a man with a heavy heart

He read her clever quips, her immaculate semicolons, her careful commas, the lilting of her longer lines, cut with adjectives and adverbs in the most perfect order. Sometimes there was a picture: a thousand words depicting her at once carefree, ruminating, glamorous.
He would be horribly in love with her.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late.
- Bukowski

He had withdrawn solely for his own personal pleasure, only to be near to himself. No longer distracted by anything external, he basked in his own existence and found it splendid. He lay in his stony crypt like his own corpse, hardly breathing, his heart hardly beating—and yet lived as intensively and dissolutely as ever a rake had lived in the wide world outside.

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черно-белая меланхолия

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К сожалению, у меня нет глубокой душевной травмы, я не страдаю от сильных переживаний, навеянных одиночеством или романом в зачатке,
меня не трясёт от новых знакомств с умными и красивыми, я не предвкушаю уик-энд в надежде, что от изменит мою жизнь.
Не просыпаюсь в воскресение с мыслью «вот бля!», не продумываю план завоевания, не мучаюсь от безответной любви.
Не ищу новых сексуальных партнёров для коллекции,не пишу невразумительных смс малознакомцам и не переживаю по поводу двусмысленности ответов.
Я не устраиваю «случайных» встреч в общей компании,
не придаю значения пустым обещаниям и не рассуждаю о преимуществах свободы.
Видимо, я просто зануда.



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He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others - the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unliminted potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would sleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

plunge into the universe

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Тот, который
не поворачивает головы,
если слышит – а он-то слышит, – мой тихий шуршащий шаг,
тот, которого лучше было бы звать на «Вы»,
тот, который не станет в одежде скрывать ножа –
он и сам весь оружие, весь беда, –
он выходит ко мне на танец в огромный холодный зал;
как мы чертим круги, – о, вынеси нас вода,
посмотрите на нас, имеющие глаза.

До утра, до утра свет не гаснет в моём дому,
до утра кто-то бьёт и бьёт во мне в медный гонг.
Тот, на которого взгляда не подниму,
если услышу – а я-то слышу, как ходит, ходит, да всё кругом,
я руками держу затворы – чур меня, чур,
я кружу по комнатам, пальцы скрещиваю во тьме;
он же слышит, слышит, как я для него молчу,
как никто, он умеет молчать в ответ.

Людям кажется – ходим окольными тропами,
ездим по городам;
это танец, – странный, долгий и медленный, круговой.
Тот, которого, может, и не было никогда –
может, я загляделась в небо над головой,
и пошла она кругом? –
тот, у которого каждый жест
для меня открыт, – как всегда, попадает в такт;
раз, и два, и три, и четыре, и пять, и шесть,
и пускай будет так.
Пускай просто будет
так.

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Are there ever adequate words for this experience? When you are suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of feeling,
a knowing, when you are drawn to someone in this way? With the strength of the unavoidable?

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(c)Лилианна Сашина

Твой голос – дождь, весенний тёплый дождь:
ты говоришь, а я – дышать не смею.
Согрей мою озябшую ладонь,
ты чувствуешь, как пальцы онемели?

ты говоришь, а я – тебе внимаю,
в коктейль январский, где тоска со льдом,
плеснём немного розового мая.
..

Лови губами, пей
любовь мою на ломаном французском.