on dreams

The simple fact is that people who achieve excellence in their fields didn’t just have a dream. They got up at 4:00 am to practice on parallel bars or had to forgo other desirable activities and paths in order to get in six hours of violin practice a day, or stayed off several million absurd writing advice blogs with their overheated little cliques that dispense useless regurgitated maxims and empty praise and decide to actually confront their own thoughts on a page. Or they read Beowulf and Dante carefully and deeply when they didn’t see any point, since all they were interested in was Sylvia Plath, because someone of more experience and wisdom told them to do so. I don’t know whether we’re overly lazy, stupid, or childish these days. But the idea of preparing oneself for excellence has somehow disappeared. So – my advice to dreamers: Don’t just follow your dreams. Earn them. Do what it takes to achieve it. Work for it. Don’t just sit there and dream because if you do, it will never, ever be yours.

Harrison Solow, Don’t Follow Your Dream

because Jennifer Egan.

"There’s a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to."

— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Boysenberry

I wonder what would have happened

if your kindness was enough
for a girl like me?

If I never felt compelled
to leave you
for someone mean.

My hair would still be long,
how you liked it. Sometimes I’d free it
from its coiled bun and let it mop
our cabin floor. This is how
I’d make you laugh.

I’d eat venison. I’d have to. Learn
to love anything whose heart you could stop
beating—like you did with mine.
I’d even watch as you skinned the deer, tender,
like rolling stockings down my butter-white thighs.

There’d always be pie. I’d always be pregnant.
We’d name our daughter something wild
like Boysenberry. Our son, Grizzly.

My writing would be confined
to Christmas cards, or recipes,
or obituaries

for the lives I mourn
each time the road forks,
each time the world says
choose.

by Megan Falley