My-dearest-giulia - GIULIA

You ever see a pretty dress, a well-organised notebook, a peculiar balcony or read one line of poetry and get the overwhelming urge to reinvent yourself

Ahem, I may or may not have read far too many novels recently. How do I know this? I have now developed a slight crush on my academic rival in school. Goodness.

“Is it foolish to speak of little joys that occur in the middle of tragedy? It is our humanity. Whatever we have left of it. We must not deny it to ourselves.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, from Still Dancing: An Interview With Ilya Kaminsky by Garth Greenwell

23 years old and I’ve never had a significant other.

I’ve never held hands with someone. I’ve never gone out on a date. I’ve never even been kissed. It never used to really affect me, all of this. I always had this innate confidence that it wouldn’t be like this forever; that my person would come when they’re meant to. But lately, it’s been weighing on me. I’m not a middle-schooler anymore, or a teenager. As each year goes by, it seems more and more out of reach.

Maybe it’s seeing all of my old friends from school getting engaged on social media or moving in with their SO. Maybe it’s because we’ve been in a pandemic for two years and having someone to love and feel loved by would bring a sense of comfort and lightness. I’m not really sure. All I know is, it’s a heavy feeling, this feeling like you’re not desirable or wanted. It makes you so afraid that you’ll never find anyone, because how could you if all you’ve ever known your entire life is being single? The thought of being in a relationship *EVER* is like a pipe dream to me. And it’s awful to feel that way.

But I still hope for it, just the same. It’s just that the hopefulness if starting to get painful.

Interviewer: What difference in usage would you point out in these three languages [Russian, English, French], these three instruments?

Nabokov: Naunces. If you take framboise in French, for example, it’s a scarlet color, a very red color. In English, the word raspberry is rather dull, with perhaps a little brown or violet. A rather cold color. In Russian it’s a burst of light, malinovoe; the word has associations of brilliance, of gaiety, of ringing bells. How can you translate that?

- Vladimir Nabokov, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor. Bryan Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, Eds.

To write is to cradle myth & memory both & emerge with the fact

of your flesh. I praise the first book that touched me because it was beautiful,

because it was written by a stranger born looking just a little like me & that made him beautiful, & in it

I find every person I’ve loved into godhood tunnelling through the page & beyond the echo

of those precious trees allowing breath: their shadows blurring into a wave, rich & urgent, to greet me.

— Natalie Wee, from “Self-Portrait as Pop Culture Reference,” Beast at Every Threshold

because you were only 5 when you learnt the dark was something you should be afraid of and that night, a child found god in the bathroom light

when you turned 11, someone said you were too loud, too brash, too annoying for a girl; they made you think you’d never make it in this world

then came your 13th birthday when you realised that your mother would only love the person you could become for her, so you made yourself smaller and smaller until you ceased to exist outside of your own mind, screaming “are you happy now, mother?” but no voice comes out because you can’t be too loud, remember?

at 15, you hated yourself for not being able to fight without crying (you still do) so you don’t let anyone in that can hurt you

and now that you’re 17, you’ve waited for summer long enough to know it will never arrive for a person who says so little of what she means.

// you’ve been 8, on your way to 18, and barely survived the years in between

I’m so sorry that I haven’t been able to post lately, but I’ve just been very busy. For the last two weeks, I’ve had a summer course at a *certain British university*, and now I’m in Italy to visit my family and friends (while also taking French classes in the mornings). Between all that and the insane heat in Europe, I’ve been completely exhausted every night. I’ll try to post more, darlings (aka the two people who like my posts)!