Leopold & Bonaparte
In French, you don’t really say “I miss you.”
You say “tu me manques,”which is closer to “you are missing from me.”
I love that. “You are missing from me.”
You are a part of me. You are essential to my being.
You are like a limb, an organ, or blood.
I cannot function without you.
The physical appearance of the please makes no difference.
9 
You are a hero
for living from that moment
to this one. You never need to apologize
for how you chose to survive.
Your body is a map I know every inch of
and if anyone else
were to kiss me, all they would taste
is your name.
—Clementine von Radics
(Source: pushthemovement, via awriterandhismuse)
(Source: appleday, via infinite-bohemian)
This is a first, she thinks. Then realizes so much is a first with him, her running up and down the corridor naked, the loose grip even now on her wrist, his almost sleepy sexuality where there seems no boundary between passion and curiosity and closeness, unlike one of her earlier lovers, who had been ardent but selfish.
And yet he keeps far away from her what else he is. As though he wishes in some way to remain a stranger. Why does that happen… with such an otherwise generous man? These men with art, like nineteenth-century botanists who, though wise and obsessive, claim only professional affection for the world around them.
But the next day, standing in the meadow, he invites Anna to visit the trailer, and she hesitates, thinking the offer is a commitment on his part, even a tentative one. It implies too much knowledge of the other - his home could be a capsule of the past or of a possible future. HEr own hesitation at breaking their formality is interpreted by Raphael as shyness, or modesty, or a desire not to take the relationship further. And in some way this is not a misinterpretation of Anna. For she too has lived a stranger’s life. There are layers of compulsive secrecy in her. She knows there is a ‘flock’ of Annas, and that the Anna beside this unnamed river of Rafael’s is not the Anna giving a seminar at Berkeley on on of Alexandre Dumas’ collaborators and plot researchers, is not the Anna in San Francisco walking into Tosca’s or eating at the Tadich Grill on California Street.
- Michael Oondatje, Divisadero
(Source: thefilmfatale)
26 
C’est la solitude qui m’a trempé le caractère, que j’ai mauvais, bronzé l’âme, que j’ai fière, et le corps, que j’ai solide.
- Gabrielle Chanel
(Source: olgaazh)
There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura.
….
In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence.
—The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
(Source: cre-amore, via elspethrose)
