When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty. The world teaches you that the way you exist in it is disgusting — you watch boys cringe backward in your dorm room when you talk about your period, blue water pretending to be blood in a maxi pad commercial. It is little things, and it is constant. In a food court in a mall, after you go to the gynecologist for the first time, you and your friend talk about how much it hurts, and over her shoulder you watch two boys your age turn to look at you and wrinkle their noses: the reality of your life is impolite to talk about. The world says that you don’t have a right to the space you occupy, any place with men in it is not yours, you and your body exist only as far as what men want to do with it. At fifteen, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. At almost thirty, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met still somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. They are children. They are children.

| Stevie Nicks (via laesquinalatina)

I DIDN’T THINK I COULD LOVE HER MORE. 

(via resplendent-quatopygia)

542 notes 

The way you slam your
body into mine reminds
me I’m alive, but monsters
are always hungry,
darling, and they’re only
a few steps behind you.
Richard Siken (via loveyourchaos)

(Source: control-denied)

4,234 notes 

There will be days when you want to just throw in the towel and give up. There will be days of stiff necks and no sleep and sore muscles. People will be cruel. Food will go bad. You will feel like the world is out to get you. Everything will start to frustrate you, the news will make you sad. Winter will creep up on you and you will find yourself alone and burrowing yourself in your schoolwork to try to keep the loneliness at bay.
But then spring arrives. Something big blooms in your chest. Sparrows sing to you and the air suddenly is clearer. You fall in love. You will grow a garden. Good things will start to come to you, beautiful people will find you. Remember those good things when the days get cold and the nights get long. Remember that you deserve to feel good. That you deserve to have good people and good food and a safe place to come home to. Remember that bad moods pass and that all bad days end. And that no matter where you are or how lonely you get, somebody out there is looking for you and is waiting for you to find them and give them your love.
excerpt from “letter to my future daughter” by esperanza friel (via cobie-smulders)

(Source: byrdseed)

3,713 notes 


Cleopatra’s Underwater Palace, Egypt 

Cleopatra’s Underwater Palace, Egypt 

(Source: wliabl)

171,426 notes