# 28 || chère soi-même,

i.
# enigmatic  # tea vs. lattes  # fairytales  # move up and away  # the luxury of loneliness  # imaginary intolerances # splendi.co  #finishmynovel  # live in your body, not your head (so much)  # 15 seconds of courage # read more # comfort over couture # gratitude # honesty # empathy # compassion # love always and forever    

ii.

 

(wandering through Central Park, in Septembre this year)

If I accomplish nothing else in the next year other than the reality of a suitcase and a girl hand-in-hand on another adventure all around the world, then that's okay. I can't deny the reality that every single year I blossom like the flowerfille I strive to be. So, I won't illustrate 2012 as a disappointment, but rather it has been a start and I have unabashed high hopes for 2013 and beyond. The act of merely existing, is a feat with insufficient recognition and I think we're all doing a really wonderful job. You plummet and you fly, and sometimes the two don't balance out. Sometimes they won't for weeks. I can't forget that, and that is why I damn the whole concept of staying present. Because often when I do, I feel only the ache of nostalgia and forget how beautiful everything was and will be. If I close my eyes, everything is as perfect as I can imagine it.   

This year I dragged my suitcase through eleven countries, got promoted, tripped in love for the first time, went to New York City, drove on the right side of the road, ate McDonald's in the Louvre, and made/kept some of the best friends a girl could dream for.  So, despite my slight aversion to the "you know who you are" additions at the end of some personal paragraphs, I believe that the people, of all ages and all places around the world, who have made this year more special than I ever could have imagined, know who they are and why I love them to the complete capacity of my heart. Thank you so very much. xo

# 27 || comme des diamants dans le ciel *~*~*

Do you ever hear the colours in certain songs? Bon Iver is a comforting kind of blue-grey and I think anything by Fleet Foxes is a forest green and that shade of brown that doesn't bring you down-the-rabbit-hole. Lately I like songs that elucidate midnight blue, like Ane Brun's These Days and anything by James Blake. When things get really sad I need Balam Acab (Welcome will change everything !), Múm, Real Estate, or anything that can both cause and curb a potent pang of nostalgia to reverberate through my body. 



I dream of a trip away from this ( e t e r n a l ) existential crisis. Recently, the ghosts seem so awake and sorrow is strong without a source. Sometimes lonely is an understatement, and sometimes it's a selfish thing to say. When your (freight)train-of-thought offers infinite opinions, you forget which one really belonged to you. My curiosity seems both a brilliance and a burden, when right is wrong and somehow I seem to know best when I don't know anything at all.

Dreams cannot be perpetual, because the permanence we crave will only transpire through movement and erraticism. You're always where you need to be, and every second, every suffering, and every stumble of every day attributes to the incredible being that you are. Do you take risks? The kind that nobody notices or cares about and probably won't even make a good story afterwards. Until now. Because at this precise moment I want to emphasis the significance of the smallest things and the foundations of a thought. I believe good intentions are the most important thing, and are the catalyst for "success" (for lack of a more appropriate, less silly word) - regardless of how wretched it all may seem.











Let the sky-blue, rose-gold, pure-white hope bloom inside your soul and you'll see the meaning in what seems meaningless. Floating is just the preliminary before you fly, before you soar. There's much merit in the movement of drifting, of wandering, of learning, of trying, of seeing ---- imagine the magnitude of your story when you take a step sideways and see what magic you have made.

( With love, A. x )

# 26 || " you're a wallflower, charlie "

un

 

for Victoria Letch, with love.

deux

What sort of legacy do you want to leave behind, how would you like to be remembered? Your career? Your favourite place in the whole world? The song you played when you were almost incurably sad? When I was a little girl, every other day I would ask, "Mummy, am I nice? Do you think the other kids at school think I'm nice?" It's curious that I remember the question but not the response, perhaps that is an allusive suggestion that self-improvement is infinite. Do you think it's really that difficult to live your life in order to be remembered ( if absolutely nothing else ) as the very best kind of person? One compassionate thought, in silence or aloud. One act of charity, be it small or large. One deep breath, you don't need to defend yourself. 

 

   

trois

To be judged for the things you choose not to say, rather than the things you do - that is the perk of being a wallflower. If being the serious, quiet, lonely one means that your head gets to race at the speed of light and you can read the world in retrospect, then hip hip hooray ! For all the moments you couldn't find the courage, for all the opportunities you feel you've let slip through your fingers, for all the the things you wish you could have said -- new moments will manifest and you'll have learned your lesson. Creating and keeping a dream inside your soul is not drifting, it is hope, it is patience and it is a virtue. But whatever the space is before the verge of tears, that is my home and I might be stuck there for a little while longer. It's not quite limbo, it's more like breathing underwater. But for what it's worth, an everlasting quasi-funk seems a whole lot better than a fall down the rabbit hole. Though the Alice in me often lusts for the latter. 

 

"If I go deep into the woods
If I go to this cabin
If I go deep into the woods
If I go will you follow?" 

-- Agalloch, This Old Cabin.

 x

# 25 || reality looks far now // but please don't go

For a real lack of anything proper to post, I have enclosed: 

I. A medley of songs that have touched me somewhere, sometime, somehow ( deeper than you ever dared ).
 

II. And, an excerpt from a storybook that I'm working on. 

" For the entirety life that I can remember in moderate detail, I have wondered, how much more am I than an echo of everything I have ever been exposed to? It is not a self-deprecating contemplation in the slightest, but when I brought it up with my mother she loosely labelled it some sort of existential crisis and told me to move right along. I would have liked to retort something along the lines of, Well, then my whole life seems to have been one colossal existential crisis! but I didn’t, for two reasons. i) I feel that would have somehow proved her point and further emphasised her conjecture that I am nothing more than an angst-ridden 20-something who doesn’t know the first thing about being a Grown-Up. ii) It’s not really in my nature to contest anything that my elders proclaim, unless it is unarguably far from the truth. 

I have noticed that we don’t often choose consciously the features that define ourselves as single characters, but if I were to tell you anything about myself, it would be that I am an incredibly nostalgic person. It is a sentiment so intense I think sometimes that nostalgia does not adequately describe this sensation that starts in my belly and travels up to my heart, before I feel like I’m going to be sick all over my shoes. 

This morning I am feeling that sensation with more enthusiasm than usual. Because I haven’t had one of these mornings in awhile. It is one of those mornings where you wake up and something clicks, like one moment you are who you were and the next moment you are who you are. You’re a completely different person! Well, maybe today I’m not completely different but something really did explode inside of me when I woke up and I feel different. Now I’m just waiting to see whether it is for the better or not. " 

III. A different dreamy note: I have been thinking of silver things lately - silver threads and silver kicks, silver boys, silver dreams and songs that make you feel silver. Silver secrets too -- for awhile now I've thought that being frank might be fitting but perhaps I am better off keeping my mouth wide shut. Silver sounds cool and easy and free, it really sounds like the lining of a cloud.

x

# 24 || infinities stretch out from infinities within ( and i'm a part of everything )

Maybe the ability to remember every word of wisdom that you swore you'd never forget, would be a curse over a quality. It makes for a million more moments of enlightenment, along with a touch of shame and self-directed reproach. I believe the latter is just as important as the former, because you never want to lose sight of all the perspective you've spent so long living for. I wonder if courage, too, could ever be a constant, or if that too is another ingredient in the concoction for humility. Perhaps apprehension and timidity exists to keep us in balance, before pride and the wrong kind of self-assurance outweigh what used to matter most.

They say humiliation is essential in etching something to your memory forever, but I think the most important things are the hardest to hold on to. Everything for a reason -- I forget that, always, all the time. I remember now, too, for a moment, that love and all its details are completely and utterly open to interpretation. And words are whatever you want them to be. When arranged side by side in a zillion different ways, they can mean everything and nothing.   

So, this is my neverending stroll on the path towards something superstarry.  I'll be a ghost, I'll be a dreamgirl, I'll be a child, I'll be a lazy Friday or a manic Sunday. You too can be whatever you would like, but do luxuriate in the fact that you have that choice to be ______x______ today and ______o______ tomorrow but don't indulge in the thought you have an eternity to transform your reality. Take fairysteps if you like, but be(gin) posthaste.

 

( some super blurry polas from today's adventure at Hanging Rock, taken by my friend Andrew -- more to come!)

x

# 23 || "that place where you still remember dreaming"

~

 

Imagine if the frameworks of our figures sent emitted light like neon signs, fluorescent sunshine when you're happy and a flickering grey when you're sad. Imagine if every smile sent a spark into the sky, you laugh and you form fireworks. Imagine if every tear sent a tremor through the earth --- can you even imagine the significance of every single being in the world? For all their fears and feelings.
 

 

~~

So I've been here/home-is-wherever-I'm-with-you for a month exactly today, and if anything, I feel a thousand times more scattered than I did when I touched down on the Tulla tarmac on that gorgeous day with all the sunshine I could have hoped for. Maybe shadowy would be the right word to describe this feeling, because there is one fragment of my existence feeling incredibly excited and inspired by path I'm paving for myself at the moment -- my own glitter-brick-road. 

"I'm afraid I can't explain myself, Sir," said Alice, "Because I'm not myself you see."

~~~

 

For the most part, I'm not really here. While I ache for change, I long for constant. And at the same time, I ponder this notion of balance that my mother has tried to instil in me since I was a little girl. For me, I think, balance comes through a cocktail of indulgence and abstinence. By no means am I an expert on anything existential, but I have made it a personal ambition to one day have the ability to appreciate and abandon what is necessary and what is not. Respectively. 

"My mum used to say to me, 'You can't have fun all the time,' and I used to say 'Why not?' Why the fuck can't I have fun all the time?" -- Kate Moss.

~~~~

I'll tell you now that magic expires faster than sorrow so suck it up swiftly and savour, savour, savour. Be thankful, be thoughtful and eat cake !

( - it works for me - )

x  

# 22 || LA MER A L'ENVERS / the sea upside down

  Matilda by alt-J

Tell me when you see a stranger smile to themselves, that your heart doesn't catch on fire for a moment. Tell me when somebody doesn't write back for no reason at all, that your heart doesn't shatter into a million little pieces for a minute or more. Significance can be over or underestimated, but oh I urge you to seek a happy medium (emphasis on the happy !) and keep it in your heart for as long as you can, you won't regret it, I swear. When all turns to shambles I take that Johnny Flynn breath and zoom out until I'm in the sky and can see that everything is happening as it must. You're a fairytale character in a foreign film and that space you think you're taking up is all yours to play with. At ease, soldier - you're in the right place at the right time, always.

Feed the magic moment and let it grow until you burst -- an explosion of glitter and dust.




fyi:
( you is you,
and you is me
and you is anyone
who needs an
open heart &
an empathetic ear )


-- while I write to remember and I write to repress, I also write to rewind and for yestermoment's version of myself to remind me that it's a gift to be alive. Even though sometimes it feels like a cross to carry, (but only sometimes).

"Just like Johnny Flynn said,
the breath I've taken and
the one I must to go on."  
-- ∆

x

# 21 || C L O U D B U R S T S

 ∆

How do you want to spend the rest of your life? I ask.

And then I tell her (or I tell myself, rather), 

To forever chase winter's tail and watch her transform into spring
to swallow tonic that makes me giddy and dance down dusty roads with my arms outstretched
to watch the sunrise every morning with a cup of tea and a pen that spills black over an unlined page
and to kill the inhibitions that keep me from indulging in the above.

∆

It seems I left pieces of myself all over the world - from the city to the sea to the sky - only to come home to my big white bed with little-to-nothing left. Jetlag is the sensation tingling behind my ears, like my hair is on fire and flames are licking the past, leaving a trail of ash behind me. Wake me up when September ends ---  because until then everything is jibberish and there is a mysterious fog lingering over the streets and the ceiling sky.  

If I stay in the present then it's an eternal grey, but if I gaze to the future then I can see the gold and the black-blue summer nights feeling infinity plus one. I gotta get rid of my wits because they've got the better of me and it's tricky to see what's real and what's not when you can talk yourself in and out of just about everything.

"Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring." — Vladimir Nabokov.

x

# 20 || existentialism |ˌegziˈsten ch əˌlizəm| !

øø

"There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place . . ." -- Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet.

( the sky over canada on sunday )

I don't know how much influence where you were born and bred has on where you end up -- because there seems to be a bridge in between where is Home and where I belong. If soy lattes and sisters and Strawberry-the-cat followed me all around the world, maybe I could stay anywhere forever. Because now I know where to be and it isn't always where I keep leaving my heart every other day. Home is where the city and the sea and the meadows are entangled together in a dusty day, home is where I love my sister, home is morning lattes with my papa, home is Masterchef on the sofa with a cup of tea and my mummy. Home is in the future and the past but never the present. Does that make any sense?

Maybe it could be adequate to fall in love with a place inside your imagination. But turn fantasy into reality and live inside a reverie. Live inside a Nightmare! If awake were better than asleep --- that's what I dream of. To weep when I wake because I'm so overwhelmingly happy to be alive. To sob before I sleep because I have to kiss goodbye a life I love for several hours. Make memories to last a lifetime and scribble words that romanticise everything about it so the story is the most beautiful that it could ever be. Fear and haze and confusion make wonderful lessons --- it's exciting, it's special and it's something you'll never forget. You'll float on okay.    

øø

There I was last week on a train crawling across Belgium with a notebook between my fingers. Je te vois, a-fille-far-up-in-the-sky, I can see you from the clouds, your hands dancing golden in the sun. Despair doesn't exist in your world. I think apathy is worse than defeat. To watch faces fade into the past because you let terror and ego get the better of you. It's all nonsense, you know. Being scared or shy ofzo. Happy is real because it's a reality you created or walked your way into. It's a state of mind you have to hold onto. If you don't forget then you can't let go, remember the butterflies and the smile you tried to swallow (but why!) and the sillyfaces you made while you were daydreaming and the fascination that some things can make you feel opalescent. I don't know if happy would really exist unless you understand melancholia.

There I was last week-end in Paris with a suitcase and 90 steps down, down, down Abbesses. The ache and exhaustion disappear, but the inner strength lasts a lifetime. Fairylights in Montmartre and a €1.60 container of dinner. Long for company but imagine how different these words would sound if somebody were there. 

There I was on the roof in a different time-zone. Sometimes lately my heart doesn't beat, it trembles. It's not panic or angst but a shiver in the heat. Maybe it's nostalgia, new and nausea mingled together to become an awkward blend of untitled emotion.

 

"Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." -- Oscar Wilde

And here I am now strolling streets I've never seen before and I can't remember my footsteps if I move too quick. The grey matter of my mind is vacuum-esque, but somehow it's not. The current of my thoughts move fast and ebb-flow with the moon. But I'll tell you one thing -- lately I'm frightened that if everywhere could feel like home, then nowhere will ever feel like home. 

x

# 19 || you're the glitter in the dark

If you feel like an earful of erratic eclectic melodies while you read, you can listen to this here.
Some of the prettiest songs I've heard since take-off 79 odd sleeps ago.

 

ø

 I don't know whether you need to experience true discomfort to know what that you've probably been living in the closest thing to a cloud all along. Perspective is ambiguous, an endless debate - like living in the present. I don't like this concept of "being present" that seems to be somewhat en vogue, as of late. When I'm present I lose track of what's really real reality, because when I'm inside the moment I'm trapped deep in my head, drowning in whatever emotion happens to be heightened at the minute. Fear, ecstasy, introversion, euphoria, tragedy -------- it washes over me like a wave and suddenly I'm soaking in my own sentiment and forget what is wonderful or wicked. I forget my cats and my beautiful sister and my autumn-coloured jeans that fit like a glove. Leave me in the intersection where you can wear a sweater if you feel like it but if you forget to grab one as you walk out the door, it doesn't matter. Leave me in a café with a half-finished latte and a notebook with a few blank pages left. Leave me in the sky where you're not sad about take-off anymore and you're not yet excited about landing. 

ø

In the end you'll write the best stories about how you felt, not what you did. Harlequin adjectives will decorate your journal and make you smile when you read your words days or weeks or years later. You won't need images when they might not come close to matching the rainbow memories in  your mind. I don't know. What am I really trying to say here? I want to tell my great-grandchildren about my pursuit of happiness and the butterflies and the time  I had a really perfect playdate with somebody somewhere at sometime and that feeling of accomplishment and the time everything fell into place. Can you find dreams? Or do you have to make them with your hands and your head?

It's not that the ache skips the door to my heart when she does her rounds, it's just that I don't let her haunt me any longer than she has to, and I do my best to show her the way out when she comes to visit. I can't remember how it goes exactly, but it's something like we spend our whole lives searching for the perfect place to stay forever but that consistency we crave only comes through movement. That's not quite right, but it's a bit like that. I'll rearrange the words and cut and paste a little when it comes to me.

ø

 

 

(by s)

x

# 18 || "... and at once I knew, I was not magnificent."

.I.

Some things are too beautiful to recount with mere words, and I'll admit that, because I love words more than fresh croissants and caramelised pear tea served boiling hot. Black letters on a blanc backdrop makes my mouth water, truly. Words with e and a nestled up together (d r ea m , l ea f, s ea, cr ea ture, t ea, f ea r, cr ea te), sentences strung together with salty emotion and paragraphs that take you places you couldn't possibly have imagined ever existed. But really, how do I tell you about the magic? The freedom? The ease? The love? Rosé by the water, we are mermaids. Non, I that's not true. We're a duck and a whale who share with each other the best of both worlds, stories of the sea and the shore. I write because I want to enlighten and be enlightened, I want to remember and forget, I want to savour both the sweet and the sour memories. Here the clouds tell stories, "that-summer-feeling", 5 supermarkets later we found film to remember one of the prettiest days I've ever seen, "home-is-whenever-I'm-with-you", a 2.a.m ice-cream interlude, I never knew my heart could feel that full, and not explode into a billion shards of glitter.

.II.

Coat your heart in your favourite colour to send away the sorrow when it comes a'knocking. (night)Dreams are just dreams, and sadness, like jet-lag is just a figment of your imagination. I don't believe we're here to suffer, the notion is beyond balmy to me. I think melancholia is just a test to see how we rise to the occasion. You know, I'll be wearing my favourite dress, with flowers tangled in my tresses. Freedom comes from the inside, it starts in your tummy and emits from your eyes in lightform -- twinkles and stars. Corny perhaps ... still, one day you'll feel it like the wind in your hair but it's now sweeping through your body.

               I want reality,                          I want to be enraptured all the time. 

Is that a bad thing? 

Will I lose the                  balance & perspective                  that I cherish with all my heart? 

       

          I want to live in a world where every person is a romantic -                               

                             where impossible is nothing 

    and there is always here. 

                             Where people dare to dream 

    and see the light outside their window on a grey morning. 

I'm really happy. Pas toujours, but for the most part. And it's the pure kind of ecstasy, the golden kind, the strong, billiant, shimmery stuff. Make the magic you want to see in the world and everything could be as perfect as you can imagine it. Stop and scrutinise --- I'm sure you're living in at least a fragment of a dream.

.III.

(images by sarah hermans, my phone, etc, etc)

xx