summer’s almost over and i still haven’t gone on a roadtrip with my best friend who i’m secretly in love with and watched them nap in the afternoon sun when it’s my turn to drive only to look away quickly as soon as they start to wake up and avoid their eyes guiltily for the rest of the evening, and had dinner in a cheap diner where i kept looking at their laughing mouth until i started wondering, recklessly, what it might be like to lean across the table and kiss them there, and then down at their hands playing with one of the laminated menu cards and trying to work up the courage to say something i couldn’t quite put into words, and gotten into a terrible fight in the middle of the desert about who took the wrong turn somewhere and said such awful, cutting things that neither of us really meant, and had to share a bed in one of the motels along the way because they only had one room left and it was one with a double, and woken up with my arm around their waist or slung over their shoulder and their legs tangled with mine, and lain in the trailer at the back of their dad’s truck wrapped in fleece blankets to watch the stars, and returned home feeling sad and empty to a house that seems too big and too quiet without their presence to fill it. what’s with that.

My Favorite 25 Essays of 2018

physically? im here, but mentally im in a renaissance painting wearing a silk dress and looking wistfully into the distance

Moon and Venus by frankastro

i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.

— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal

This is so beautiful and weirdly relatable that I’m reblogging again.

i wish i had my copy of kafka’s diaries with me because every entry goes something like this:

Sunday. I woke up in great pain and coughed up blood. Had coffee. Later I went to the theatre and a woman looked at me, but I could not make eye contact because I am repulsive. I am full of terror. I wish Goethe was alive because only he truly understood me. 

okay but this is my constant state of being

tbh i’d rather be in the gardens of Versailles rn 

Everyone rn (inc me)

i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.

— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal

Oscar Wilde’s Lipstick-Covered Tomb | Via

The practice started in the late 1990s, when somebody decided to leave a lipstick kiss on the tomb. Since then lipstick kisses and hearts have been joined by a rash of red graffiti containing expressions of love, such as: “Wilde child we remember you”, “Keep looking at the stars” and “Real beauty ends where intellect begins”. Kissing Oscar’s tomb on the Paris tourist circuit has become a cult pastime.

A fine of €9,000 ($12,000) was imposed on anyone caught kissing or damaging the historical monument, but it had no effect. It was hard to catch people in the act, and most culprits were tourists who were long gone before the police could bring them to court. Appeals from Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland to stop the practice also fell on deaf ears. A plaque asking fans to respect the tomb instead of defacing it went in vain.

Meanwhile, those greasy red lipstick stains seeped into the stone making it harder and harder to clean. Every cleaning eroded a layer of stone rendering it even more porous, so the next cleaning had to go even deeper and wear away the stone even more.

I have no idea why anyone would believe Oscar Wilde isn’t delighted by this.

It’s beautiful and illegal. Oscar Wilde would most certainly be delighted by such lovely vandalism.

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. - W. Somerset Maugham

dolce and gabbana alta moda f/w 2018

“Eros”

A shoot I modelled in and creatively directed for Valentine’s Day.