“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter – they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”

Sylvia Plath’s The Unabridged Journals [of Sylvia Plath]

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

Notes from 20XX, September [XX]

Subject: Do we have to [REDACTED] simply, with ourselves?

There are understatements and there are statements which feel [not just wrong, but] ugly in mouth. Roll the words back and forth a time too many and you can feel the fucking poison—off, past-done … true when composed, or imagined that split second before getting stuck: occasionally, they do get stuck, stay stuck—I can never decide whether reside or linger is most [or more] apt.

But we know it before we sound them out—the ugliness, wrongness … it might have the honesty and decency of truth or coming from a good place, but the taste[?] … we flavour out that rot before we can stop ourselves at times. The wrong words for righteous reasons are still, a poison.

Then there’re times when alone actually means something far crueler than being unpeopled, or without the company the reverse implies. The decisions we make, need to take, are pushed to take, compelled, have to, despite a million forces conditioning us to retreat back into our trauma boxes.

The brightest of people struggle, think … contemplation is related but never much of that particular much: it wouldn’t need so many more syllables—it’s type, not the same—like focus, or ruminate. To propose a hypothetical, is to think … related but never much of that particular much.

Mouths, feel those thoughts, faster sometimes.

—JustD

Toni Demuro’s Illustration, A Quiet Place