I know this intimately.
Words by Erynn Brook | Illustrations by Emily Flake| Longreads | June 2018
Erynn Brook is a feminist and freelance writer who studies media, people, communication and culture.
Emily Flake is an illustrator for The New Yorker, The Nib, MAD Magazine, and New Statesman, among other places.
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Editor: Michelle Legro
Art director: Katie Kosma
Support for this work was provided by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
I have a problem when people say something’s real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I’ve always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words.
Timothy Walter (Tim) Burton
Burton on Burton
sometimes I think … books have been my only real friends … my books & my diary
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.
Betty Smith
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Delicate blue flowers caught my eye in the flower bed. I wondered where they had come from as they were nothing that we had planted … they had just grown. It only took a moment to realise that they were flax flowers and that, in fact, we were responsible for their presence after all, albeit inadvertently. They had appeared around the base of the bird feeder, where the constant stream of overwintering avian diners must have scattered stray seeds. The seeds had lain there quietly, and now, with the advent of summer, were filling all the barren spaces in the flower bed. Feeding the birds through the winter was paying an unexpected dividend.
The beauty of the flowers reminded me of something my son had said earlier that morning. He had been over the moon to get a message from a friend he had met on his travels… someone for…
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the spiral dance
The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, a temporal, The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Ursula Le Guin
The Dispossessed
via (ix of swords)
via (viii of swords)
via (vii of swords)
I have the same
emotional response to it as a
hundred million other women.
Nothing so dramatic as a
miscarriage, my infertility is subtle,
masks itself in bodily quirks like my
urine never having enough LH to
mark the pee stick in
double pink lines; quirks like
pains at the wrong times, or my
body’s refusal to make an
egg on time, or at all. Quirks like
my already compromised thyroid under
attack again. Every
invasive procedure, they
stick things up your vagina in some
sick, consensual form of rape where
you desperately need this
child, and so you endure it.
Every
period like a thousand deaths of every child I imagined from
infancy to adulthood, a hundred thousand potential
people I might have gestated–
all killed in a whirlwind of cramps and a sea of blood.
silverapplequeen 