I'm not sure what I'll do, but - well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale. 

F. Scott Fitzgerals, The Ice Palace

Images via welltraveledwoman

You and your splendor

I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel. You and your splendor; lingering in my brain across a timelessly barefoot reality.

Virginia Woolf

Boston

Image via Sorakeem

value

you are valuable because you exist. not because of what you do or what you have done - but simply because you are.

Max Lucada 

life lately, through a lens

© 2013 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved {photo source: my iphone)

Anon

be still, my beating heart. you feel too much, want too much.

control yourself, you impetuous little fiend. you give me away, pounding in the chest at such sudden provocation.

steady now, my keeper of secrets. time can alter this moment, cheapen this conviction, blur this judgment.

hush now, flutter softly. but heavens, no. never desist.

Inspired by 

William Mountfort's 

Zelmane, 1705

you are my yes

it was late. i had plans. i rearranged.

she was laughing at her own joke. simply, effortlessly, uninhibited. and i kept thinking of how she was her own yes. hell, was she a yes.

we had met in the middle, some diner along main street. it was almost a supernatural force, some kind of enigmatic coercion, each unable to fight the impulse to get to that middle ground. we were magnets drawn together to fill the voids of the opposing charge, to counteract the negative forces each carried. it was as if our entire being depended upon it.

get in the car, she had said. drive. drive in my direction. i obeyed.

she was my little 2 am secret, my sister.

the waitress had stopped passing by to check if we had signed the bill. though there were people and events and responsibilities pining for our presence elsewhere, neither she nor i could leave. not yet.

these are the talks i remember. the heavier the eyelids, the sincerer the words. the silence never was awkward, but a shared intimacy of the unfilled spaces.

words were sparse and chosen carefully. they were words we had not yet dared speak aloud, as if the saying alone made them true, made them real. they were words that terrified and engrossed, suggested and enchanted.

and in this disclosure, we offered ourselves, unguarded, knowing that if our self vanishes, there would be another self to lean on, one separate and distinct, but pumping the same blood through different veins.

she was tripping on those words, as she twirled the ice in her water glass with a straw, her brazen purple fingernails shining so femininely.

i don't know how it came to this, she said. i enjoy his presence. 

she loved him, some boy down the street. she didn’t know it, couldn't find the words, but we both knew once she did, there would be no need for me to give her an answer. the answer would be in the telling.

i realized as i leaned into the edge of the table in rapture, that in her frightened audacity, i saw myself.

and what about me? she waited for my answer and i felt that i, too, was waiting for my own reply.

i told her i needed nothing more than the sea and someone to share it with and a million reasons to write.

yes, she said. yes, and when you find it, always say yes.

an answer to her own question.

© 2013 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved {photo source via}