The Girl Who Loves Synchronicity

no one tells you how much of life takes practice. not just writing, painting, running, singing, etc, but practicing how to make friends. how to make the right ones. getting practiced at how to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good person. practice identifying when people haven’t earned that. learning to recognize your right to rage and, eventually, how to offer mercy. so much of life is muscle memory, and i’ve begun to realize there are so many more parts of ourselves to flex and stretch and strengthen than those we’re taught in anatomy lessons

A rainbow over Gaza City. Mohammed Abed/AFP

Gravestone from a local cemetery. Five children, aged 2 to 15, died from diphtheria in five days.

Diphtheria has a ~10% mortality rate, higher in younger children.

The vaccine against diphtheria is part of the WHO's recommended childhood vaccination program and resulted in a more than 90% decrease in number of cases globally between 1980 and 2000.

Remembering 4th grade, when we got to the story in our social studies book about vaccines. Both my teacher and the teacher next door were probably in the late fifties or early sixties. Mrs. E. next door had survived polio but had long-term muscle weakness in her right hand that made her have to hold up her wrist with her other hand while writing on the board. She talked about people she'd grown up with who'd ended up in iron lungs or otherwise permanently disabled in major ways.

Mrs. P., my teacher, gave a terrifying account of her brother surviving whooping cough by pulling the mucus out of his throat with his fingers.

I was in 4th grade in the early 1990s. Vaccines as a life-saving option are that fucking new. People who survived before they existed were able to tell me first-hand stories. It is beyond shameful that there are so many people willing to put their health and their fucking children's health at severe risk because they want to feel morally superior.

Ponta da Piedade  -   Marc Dalessio , 2021.

American , b. 1972 - 

Oil on panel , 30 x 20 cm. 12 x 8 in.

are u ever sick w longing. and i don't just mean romantic longing. i mean longing for a place you barely get to see, longing for friends you no longer have, longing for feelings you might have left behind in your childhood, longing for creativity, longing for a rich and more expansive life, longing for less inhibition. longing for more passion. longing for ur life to be so incandescent w something it thaws all the frost in ur bones. are u ever so consumed w it it rends ur heart in two. do u understand me

this is not just "look out the window and sigh" longing. i'm talking you're at the grocery store and you're suddenly hit w a wave of grief bc you don't have it. you don't have whatever it is you ache so badly to have. you go about your everyday life and yet it throbs under your skin moment by moment, almost as though it has a life of its own. that's the kind of longing i mean.

sorry i didn't text back i've been having a bad day since i was like 12 years old

You're petrified by your own fucking standards - and your fear of failure! This is the truth. ANATOMY OF A FALL (2023) | dir. Justine Triet

Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories

All of Us Strangers (2023) dir. Andrew Haigh