Pathological Rumination

Sapere Aude

Laura Richings — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:26:11 GMT

Another documentation of a selection of thoughts spanning the months since my last post.

I. On development via pretentiousness sans caveats, explanations and the usual self-conscious apologia: Swim in a bigger pool and flail. Be seen to flail. If failure exists it sits dry on the side-lines knowing oceans only through seashells.

II. I’ve tread wave after torrent of information and each next threat with strengthening faith in every middle’s edge to glisten once shone light upon by even the weakened hand raising a torch. Days I feel as a puzzle piece dropped by the arm of a robot into the wrong box demand less searching to determine not only how to crawl outside, whether it’s worthwhile but which parts of the spiritual anatomy are strengthened in the process. It’s good luck the echoes of futility wage war not long for the world within fools. Those baritone whispers propel themselves at their peril and absorb into the palm of a slow moving mist raised from the warmth of the benevolent supine treading softly buoyant over black vacuous depths having swallowed many a clever miser. Embedded within the fabric of this world, only so many stitches ahead to envision, and limits. We’re swimming, turning heads back in memory of past patterns. Occasionally I catch a peripheral glimpse while reaching back in a loop alongside their edges. The view’s always different.

III. I’d dry your tongue between my fingers and pen a thicket at the tip, let go, watch you swallow my desert. In nature, danger’s in its element. Days we’d title Disaster she’d consider sweating out a fever. To our news of what’s unprecedented, she’d shrug leaves free of trees, you’re new here.

IV. What’s most noble probably is to remain in a place, absorb and chronicle it. To leave for a time for the sake of inner expansion mostly in service to comparison, so only to return home and better chronicle.

V. The story of my life may be a paradox of oscillating neuroticisms, each their thousand directions reaching into expanse without obstacle. I felt perfectly inconsequential in every scenario despite the realities of them. Declining approaches then lamenting my allocation to the fringes. A youth of gazing at and analysing groups deciphering why they thrived or fought with particular attention paid to the admittance of what I deemed as outliers. Idealising a day they’d let me into some mysterious club without any advancement on my part anyway. It was weird, I was weird. Wrote lists at the end of each term and semester crossed off as another period supercut of social failure. When of legal drinking age and entering the pub my graduating class frequented, I was stunned by a sporty tomboy with long brown hair and printed freckles. She was surprised to see me, thought I hated everyone. “No…” What a revelation to be seen, seeing.

VI. Only through observing in stillness the happenings of my mind do I realise its oversaturation with arbitrary matters. Of late I’ve scarcely allowed this quiet which today replenishes something vital in myself as would rains to the field keeled to drought.

VII. The pain bent me down to tile yesterday. In cradling a swollen belly with my forehead pressed to porcelain, visions of other women flicker beyond it. I think of women whose labours nearly killed them, imagine this a small dose and admire them. I think of women who’ve undergone sedation and the knife to eradicate organs responsible for time counted in the calendar of agony, picture the scars on their bellies burned by scolding water they’d hoped would grant them reprieve and admire them. One day out of every month, usually when the night sky yawns its widest, I think, no way could nine months of carrying then birthing be worth this pain prolonged but can’t fight the understanding it is. Pain is one of the most interesting manifestations of the illusion one moment really does extend time from left to right. That latent in pain is a thing worth suffering it.

VIII. Gratitude is not synonymous with complacency. Its therapeutic reliability comes not through delusion but awareness.

IX. The cross-fertilisation of ideas between the right two individuals can bear powerful consequence.

X. You did nothing and it rippled outward as if we two were tank-bound ‘til you crawled out leaving me knee-deep in the shallows.

XI. Observation is the writer’s gift and lament. To keep a secret, you should not speak it. Not aloud to a soul. In nail salons, on public transit and sat at picnic tables I’ve listening to the sensitive details of your lives; names, dates, locations. Beside you, behind I’ve sat on the other side of the fence while neighbours partied with friends, listening as those remaining in the morning socially excavate whoever they’d audibly championed the prior night. Their only crime: having left. Rare is the person whose pinky finger stays curled into position.

XII. The messenger is often of more sinister portent than the message.

XIII. Every death is of a natural cause.

XIV. Not all memories are readily roused by the sincerity of will.

XV. Trust the imagination to permeate spaces plagued by old ways and rules.

XVI. One failing to configure a long term plan into language except during directional bouts of passion toward personified objects of their current desires seem and are unsafe because there’s nothing foundational happening there internally, the curation speaks to nothing more than a tailored mirage in the distance haloed around an external figure in flux.

XVII. The proliferation of optionality in consumption does not satiate the reaching thing inside of us.

XVIII. The horizon widens. Many plains, pains and regions of the self remain to cartograph. Let not it be our lot in life to agonise over latent potential assigned to other people.

XIX. Dignity’s cast aside like nothing by what screams for affirmation it is love. To some we serve as the first mirror they’ll crack at the glimpse of an unfavourable reflection.

XX. Affixing to being seen, heard, liked, and understood cradles the rot of genuine relation.

XXI. Some days are donations to sadness, rest assured we’d still resent our lot without loss.

XXII. Want and need are separate things but a transition in our outlook and experience is made available by the conscious marriage of the former to the latter.

XXIII. A conversation centred around comparison between subjects becomes unfavourable where an individual argues in derision of one for reasoning rooted in personal insecurity.

XXIV. Rarely does a person inspire never having offered an original idea when failing also to propagate connections inciting intrigue between others preestablished.

XXV. Intentions thinly veiled by covert probing tactics disturb more often than audacious invasive questioning. Curiosity is one of the most natural and forgivable human traits, through transparent approach its capacity to flatter prevails.

XXVI. In the room without drywall the mattress was a sweat-stained mustard sponge, there were no presumptions of spare cotton bedding nor any present and for company, fleas, the echoing brawls of bickering kin tossing glass and kicking tins. For years for light we had nothing or an idea. No curtains, no moon. One night the ceiling socket wasn’t empty anymore and I wasn’t sure I liked that any better. Between the bulb and moth, I was as voyeur. The floor sometimes slithered, was always hard, cold and concrete. A swim in the creek paired with the prayer daddy’s lighter only burnt the back off leeches. The grey telly static felt familiar. The radio station was not.

XXVII. Loyalty while often assumed mutually prerequisite isn’t a trial-precedent quality between two people and that’s why genuine risk is necessary for its emergence. The most reliable people aren’t infallible, they prove consistency over time as conscientious self-investigators who’ve worked and do continually to understand the motives behind their own actions and do not lie about them when new understandings come to light. Loyalty is found in those foremost loyal to themselves.

XXVIII. Sticks and stones may break my bones but an unqualified diagnosis of autism may be strategically convenient.

XXIX. There’s rarely reward in warning against specific individuals, for any of the message to penetrate, a person must already respect our judgement. In even such circumstances the minefield is live. An impassioned warning strikes even the dimwit as a potential act of aggression, condescension or tactic of manipulation: they’ll comb over potential motives. Which is wise. To retain and wave around receipts of another’s transgressions socially outside providing evidence necessary during legal proceedings signifies internal doubt, it’s transparently an effort at validation through external affirmation which is natural and not contemptible. Still, the ascendant volume of one party more often serves the quieter perpetrator of ills. External validation of a history becomes largely unnecessary within a well-kempt inner environment of self trust. Once we no longer require anybody else to determine the fact or degree of ills against us, our inner dial is set and people rebound off our limits once hit. In knowing what’s no good for us subjectively, neither denials nor applause serve as more than echoes.

XXX. The wise gather more friends into a room than its occupants realise.

XXXI. Last night during an in-dream exhibit of my visual art an artist present approached me with scepticism and outright asked the meaning of the pieces. I glanced away, back and away in the way of an idiot about to lie and offered some trite line blending art’s subjectivity and my own need and intent to uncover the answer for myself. He walked away without another word knowing he needn’t have asked. The sense impression left by the interaction was: I knew the work wasn’t ready. I know the work isn’t ready. We, inextricably linked.

XXXII. If the folds of hell rolled to my toes in warning and its heat made a meal of my lowest bones, still too to you would I draw nearer.

XXXIII. Their touch rough whispering death, traversing each path, thieving each patch. We fairer fear in uprooting you’d doom our petals to the pavement’s kiss.

XXXIV. Of the past we’ve matter but actions imply it doesn’t. Each piece by now so well scattered. A shattered whole teaches it’s easier to rewrite anew a near enough story to source from ashes. The man’s back again then gone in my psyche to reunite us finally only in the minds of others, for when I do move on, they’ll utter I never did.

XXXV. It’s nearly (only nearly) no pleasure to be as I am, but it’s the case. Lodged beneath heated covers in luxury really, at rest reading and highlighting important lines about important historical events and ideas and contemplating and it’s all very important. I hear the murmurs and giggling of a happy couple in another room and feel immediately snide. Auditory vibrations from the television disperse across my wall and the intimacy of dual-joy pleasantries persist alongside it and I feel snide and right. Here I am, I think, researching what leads a society to suffering horrendously while they enjoy their time as if to mock us all wiser in our states of concern. So carefree it’s careless, I note, they don’t know the suffering that awaits, think I, who does so ingeniously opt into an advanced placement in it.

XXXVI. A thought presents itself that as it can, might well realise itself materially. Or, “I’ve had an idea.”

XXXVII. Today’s writer might set alight his entire city in sacrifice to tomorrow’s pen.

XXXVIII. Were ever there true visionaries without optimism? Never mind, the question runs rife with others. I’m working on something. Scribbling on note cards, adjusting furniture, my largest paperback thesaurus spread open upon my lap. The sensation is as the reunion of spirit and body. If I were to condense the rambling on its way in advance, I’d declare more optimism (shared in category with hope, faith and trust) toward the present state of the arts than has ever either announced itself or laid dormant within. By both necessity and evidence. Not only has expression always faced restraints; creativity demands them.

XXXIX. Sometimes people don’t hear what you’re saying, because anticipation speaks louder. They decode what isn’t cryptic, absorbing not your words but what those sorts might imply.

XL. How many dead writers prone to low spells remained longer than intended, attempting to ready others for their exit? The ego, the audacity. I’d move to collate examples… further ideas drift through and seek nourishment and again I grow attached to the prospect of living to raise them. Gaining temerity I’m taken by the future, still stuck in my body. Seeds encased in their tombs depend upon the violence of a hungry mother for flight. Last night while the pressure compressed my chest, I struggled between fondling my wrist and carotid artery for echoes of the mass thumping against its anthropoid vault, deciding if—I’d go quietly. Death’s an experience that shouldn’t be spoiled by the future of others. Sapere aude. It’s a writer’s lot to build a language for our mad perspective, to describe an incommunicable quality. We realise it’s hopeless. This does not deter us.

Records, Profound and Banal Part II.

Laura Richings — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:18:48 GMT

I. To adopt the mask of the other’s projections and wear well their underestimations. To laugh without cracking the resin. To know the assumptions people make are an indication of the quality of their own imagination.

II. Under new context all information scattered will be reassessed, questioned. This process will be a painful one if so permits luck on the path to wisdom.

III. I say two two’s build four, you; polysyllabic words wound.

IV. Over the phone I said “I’ve been…” another filled “depressed?” how inadequate a word. Maybe no; not quite? since I’ve real doubts a depressed person’d work up the prerequisite stamina to type out a semi-colon. The weight of its charisma sure to springboard and break the ribcage of those types whose ears are as two spades to soil already. No such suggestion stays credible in the sign’s presence. It’s a comma shooting baskets. The thing’s kinda winky and athletic. Energetically demanding. Surely a depressed person couldn’t do this; ?

V. My life is whatever I think it is; great if I say so and awful when merely theatre my mind’s confined to.

VI. People whose point of pride and capital lies in their own affective and cognitive empathy will, even while asserting the necessity of boundary-setting in awareness of what that really entails, still fumble the handling of another’s first push against their own. Why’s that?

VII. To you she’s a seaside carnival ride, rusted bolts loosening with every throttling motion. You lift a flimsy section of chain-link fence to circumvent the cost of admission. This is the slow clunk-clunk-clunk before acceleration.

VIII. Beware, a writer will drag entire worlds around you.

IX. We heed our noble sonar hearts and wisely so, for so it is. Inside us all an instrument, face struck by rute and rod and stick, built to break beneath time’s thrum, that day our weight a silent room.

X. What if all my sadness were just a vocabulary issue?

XI. Some moments and emotions are too beautiful to compromise with the structures of language. As a writer you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Some friends and lovers worry they mustn’t matter, then once long gone the wordsmith’s safe to resuscitate the love, pop into place the joints of their replicate doll and write old times alive. Deeply you felt for another, and now you’re just a creep with your weirdo agenda, wrestling for the cover of vagueness. I think most creatives feel like creep freak losers—no? Feeling intensely, pretending, reliant on symbolism and elegy to keep an even complexion. It’s creating from these broken places or the submission to complete anti-social chaos.

XII. We weave in and out of one another’s simulations.

XIII. Clock anomalies. When they bloat and rise to the green-lit ceiling of your empty gymnasium mind watch them bounce impenetrable across ages. Let rot the receipts in your palm. Both will. Are you where you are? From the moment we’re born, solitude chisels piece by piece of us free of one womb only to press our bodies firmly into another earthen. Dead or alive, we’re the sludge beneath somebody’s wheel. Labouring to tally indiscretions against us legibly beyond our own comprehension is a waste of time. Etch rules into a stone place inside you, then act like they’re true. Let go of the false notion you owe anybody an antemortem excuse before leaving every room.

XIV. You know, the boulder likely weighs more by virtue of its own hesitation to resume position as the mountain’s peak, but what that silly tonne of rock doesn’t realise, is that in its summit—and with the labour of old mate’s teensiest push—sets its course to roll with such momentum over and off the stone giant’s other face to secure its escape from the will of man after all! Something to consider? That the curse of Sisyphus extends beyond him, confining more than just himself to that familiar cobbled path. Or: one must imagine the boulder personified; googly-eyed, by now more than a little pissed-off and enduringly eager to construct a brand new horizon of its own.

XV. Hey, time, stop strip-mining me a minute. You might pry free some threads and push a needle in to mend an old dagger slice to my heart. It stings again. The pain pulls up vocal, says I’ve fumbled my entire life and pins down precise moments. I know, I remember. For a little while believing that’s true sounds like a good solution because it is one, and might be. That idea in prevailing would signal the death of my will and put an immediate end to this struggle. Giving in, becoming a total piece of shit? of course that’s appealing. Every day I work to make the past worth what it’s taken, by now well acquainted with the task’s ultimate futility: I die nobody, I die somebody. To who? When hell and heaven collide inside me on bad nights, it’s still only you.

XVI. Trying to describe through writing feels such the colossally futile act sometimes I’m reminded of what I can only hope are my own limitations and not those of language.

XVII. Stocks placed in other’s understanding and positive appraisals always depreciate. Make art.

XVIII. Damp death, I can smell a rank putrid rot beneath my floorboards. My dad says the snake’s teeth and venom aren’t your real problem, it’s the infection’ll get you—from what or who passed through them.

XIX. The holy water of your spiritual ruse rolls off my back before softening the soil in Texas but the dense, polluted haze of your silence hasn’t lightened at all. Widens in its shade over the heads of those below with uncalloused knees. Did it happen, whatever you hoped to achieve? Did you scale, finally conquer or make peace with a steep enough paradox? The mystery hasn’t yet thinned itself against a broken ozone but some nights my ego grows so big it breaks through and threatens to explode. True, the woman’s bitter enough tongue spits brimstone, but know your heart weighs no less today than it ever did by my measurement and no posthumous confession could alter my disposition. Amidst the grey static I’ve built home in I sift through splintered memory for evidence of my transgression against a teacher. Had I spoken over, unfairly judged or threatened any sin should split him into one too many guests to seat, meet eyes or dine with? No. Had he woken one day and weighed my own merits the old way? My every word’s a call from the heart, but you hear a whisper and turn toward the grass.

XX. The writer should marry into a good name, phonetically speaking, syllabically speaking.

XXI. Incite paranoia during the break up by saying you’ve been reassigned.

XXII. Life is a gift with a brutal returns policy.

XXIII. The older I get, the more I come to believe people really do need their secrets. That perhaps this idea of a union within which all is divulged can be counterintuitive to some creative pairs and that instead these types of entanglements benefit more from the tension of a sub textual layer plucked every so often but only when the other has glanced away, a dash and run acknowledgment of a chord or door shielding one another’s secret whatevers. The longer alive, the less I believe anybody fully lets anybody else completely inside. That maybe they shouldn’t.

XXIV. Sleep’s a reasonable enough dosage of death ‘til then.

XXV. I love women far too much to act in malice against men. I, forged of that iron have clocked out of my job as a mere cog in the wheel of perpetual violence. It’s my task to explore in good will the grace that is this life—more than endure its course.

XXVI. Even the analytic mind rhizoming self-propelled across timelines shredding apart to restructure the world if only to connect through what’s bled falls prey to failure in forging any fool-proof fortification. We prepare, assess and draw grand predictions. Our pet paranoia pays its dues, we concede its utility and decode its each animal screech in private.

XXVII. I’ll claim no mound of Earth as my own—ever—not even my last mouthful.

XXVIII. I’ve been thinking on whether there’s generosity sometimes in deliberate lies, but cling to the awareness my greatest duty is to my soul. To speak in a false tongue would contort mine, which I’m fond of, beyond recognition. To lie brings false things, is to impede another’s opportunity for growth, how ever easier in some respects each life may temporarily feel for it.

XXIX. There’s only one way to notice another’s eyes having strayed from the way.

XXX. Any halfway decent writer should generate the phenomenon of a sacred, mutually revelatory interpersonal dialogue between herself and those whose thumbs grease upside each delicate page. If yoked after weather still only to interiority, she must labour then to press in reciprocities’ place the seed of paranoia instead. Cold, hard data is no more worthy a tithe sometimes than lies. Besides, only dull people are unforgivable.

XXXI. The veil is cheap. Allegories moth-eaten by creatures feasting on your false light. From stolen crown to ground, you glow in the dark.

XXXII. Beran—bear with me, past its final beat; weigh my heart separate from its box.

XXXIII. It is our social responsibility now more than ever to steel and safeguard our sanity. To not allow paranoia and despair the controls.

XXXIV. Perspective is a blade shaped against the whetstone of experience.

XXXV. You stare at the small bundle in your arms, she sucks at the teat in her dreams but someday she’ll learn how to lie.

XXXVI. You were the soundtrack of my life for a short, potently gorgeous speck of time even, and maybe especially when the dial was tuned low. Even unheard the vibration felt. The love endures and will as long as it’s reintegrated into the open well others shall draw from for the remainder of my existence.

XXXVII. We wept inside a shared image until the high line lapped at our heels, hem, hip; rose upon a poisoned bank abreast then above but never left it.

XXXVIII. Sonus est qui spiritum meum movet.

XXXIX. All the lands on Earth for thousands of years wrestled back and forth as if playthings in the hands of petulant children.

XL. An ambulance drove fast all sirens and light, and as it passed I wondered whether the hues of red and blue flattered me.

XLI. In decency I’d live in a tiny tinderbox in the woods where the bad days in my mind were mine alone.

XLII. Despite all time crumpled, letters of appeal never sent and efforts exerted against the matter completely, a sad truism quietly pleases itself—some loves last forever.

XLIII. Some precise day and not the next will be my final. Hundreds of thousands of impressions left upon Earth’s face by the soles of my feet, most invisible to the naked eye and all blown away in the wind.

XLIV. I pray for your heart, I do not pray for a space inside your heart.

XLV. I suspect every day we doom and save one another equally in a million microscopically imperceptible ways.

Records, Profound and Banal

Laura Richings — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:53:13 GMT

I. “Teach me a lesson, thrice!” Taunting skyward, I tore split ends from my hair and swayed atop the tallest point of a rosebush, affixed, like a living ornament, crunching thorns into paste on my tongue. My mouth overflowed with new blood and congealed at the entrance. You were better for it. A house-light flashed bright, now ushered inside I wore any moniker offered, “Misunderstood Creature” or “Poorly, scorned and demure!” whatever granted favour, it was warm here, didn’t matter. Not knowing silence as a blessing, and finding mine unsettling, the stranger sought a collar and kit to unstick my lips. I, still too wild to pet and once more set to stain my disguises, shed them to flee beneath a cut of moon whose beauty mattered little to me, for you still would not share it.

II. Easiest method to understand the nature of another’s love is to disappear completely.

III. I wake up aware to contempt, you’d sell me out at the first chance, over the first then every next fool’s glance so long as its bearer believes you’re above your nature’s truest malignance. Loose the mound of dirt beneath a wordsmith’s feet preaching virtue, what’s below should consume him long before his embodied knowledge of what loyalty is. He without does not recognise, cannot inspire.

IV. When you robbed me of voice, I picked up the brush and pigment, coloured over an emptiness better primed for the scream of an acoustician. When you robbed me of dreams, my eyes shut a hundred times and opened in an instant in some sick mechanical transgression against the ordinary. When you returned for my naivety I laughed, trust; shrugged, my purpose—relinquished. I fed the body, washed the cloth and clothed the body, manoeuvred the body through a world near-totally barren of meaning to the soul asleep to the body. Near totally. Near. Near totally. What for? Why? Not often did I ask, I knew the answer to the grand joke. There wasn’t one. When you gave only pain, I took it—felt it—loved my pain, came to crave it. A mistake. What’s a life without love? There isn’t one. It’s dark out and again I’ll close my eyes, but who knows how many more times? You? You’re no thief, this is true, yours was always the righteous claim upon every thing.

V. The proximity and likability of another person does not evidence our own ideology mirrored.

VI. We must not live every day fear-addled by the prospect of some potential future deprivation.

VII. A paradoxical problem wars from within. A penchant for exhibitionism at constant odds with my nervous disposition to seek shelter in invisibility. Look at me, don’t pay so much attention. Listen, with one finger in your ear. Criticism that wounds me is profoundly more interesting than receipts of polite approbation because my nature prods and prompts “why?” where its alternate acts more typically as a head pat and lowercase signpost ushering me onward carrying little more than my current devices. Usually there’s a morsel of truth either readily apparent and protruding in a criticism that particularly bothers us, or it’s nested beneath the surface minutely raised at its location. What else have we claws for if not to retrieve it? Yes, I suppose violence. There are many questions I feel no personal impetus to seek answered. On the subject of God wherein faith is the entire point, for me, let it remain. When it comes to new discoveries on my own nature, there’s a distinct lack of futility in lodging question upon question which probably suggests no small amount of idealism.

VIII. If you never bare your teeth, many will doubt they are there. Acts redolent of cannibalisation are more often sensible avoided, yet to properly compartmentalise and set aside events of the past, they might be re-written and churned through fiction’s obfuscating fingers. My will has made no home for performing at dignified secrecy where concerns referencing more conscious inclusions of realistic depictions in writing, no matter whether close-enough litigiously true to material events or fabrications artfully constructed through the framework of symbolism and allegory. Deeming all as in service to my protagonist, no singular event is reasonable in the wishing away and so no bow I’d own glares down that notion as its target and God’s will ought never. Where fantasy swarms itself into sharpened form spots its mark instead in that which might live through old imagery shattered and re-established. Sure enough this sounds laughably close to wishing events different after all or believably re-puzzled extinguished and retold and sold for original detail but isn’t. Earlier I woke from day-sleeping, always awful, with weighted eyelids. Behind them memories I’d be wiser if blunted. Briefly taken by a violence of mind that lingered longer than in prior dreaming or humour, certainty occurred and decision. Lighter and deeper vitalities of mine depend upon the day I’d be rid; not of specific people, but remnants of them. Not-there and there dwelling beyond welcome sans arguable rights besides what’s given of above and passed down as alms; a grace vindicating some figure of my hostility along with its bearer while the story transcends it all.

IX. That last morning and some since, always feigning otherwise, I wished you’d withdrew me too. Exchanging sparse words diluted our archive better left in its capsule, all the worse off my dignity considering upon whose initiative those failures at reconciliation.

X. Some people have more to do here than be happy and to no end does it grind on me to hear dismissed the masterworks of men and women for their own sadnesses and demise, which become main points of accusation, evidence suggesting personal failures and hypocrisy large enough to negate their time and any offerings of wisdom. At work recently, my colleague and I wondered whether we’d opt for happier early circumstances if it meant losing our art, she said she would and said it with immediacy. Though holding happier people in high, high regard and calling her truly wise I said I would not, she laughed and agreed I would not.

XI. I do not long to part with my worst conclusions, I want not for my every next step to be governed by them.

XII. What are you beyond what anyone’s done? What are you left to devices alone in a room, what without your devices and dear God what when stripped of the room, your clothing and cleverness. What are you totally without wit, expectation, possession? What is where dignity ends? Or whom?

XIII. The pierced heart whose muscle has curved along one hook will not endure the blow of another’s attempt on its capture.

XIV. We were given a period of time to pretend all we are could be concealed or compartmentalised, we’re not long for these illusions now. God is also the machine.

XV. Dull people are unforgivable.

XVI. We all walk through our daily lives dreaming up the most convenient tales to make sense of the world around us.

XVII. Most webs I’ve spun into mantra shred away thin in the wind.

XVIII. Leave others with their misinterpretations, not because there’s no purpose or meaning in open discourse but because lotta times we toil attempting to know, be known and share in good faith in places it’s more often presently simply uncultivable.

XIX. I was talking to an artist yesterday about the unconscious aspect of painting, or maybe more accurately, the will of an artwork. She mentioned a painting she’d been working on amidst a time of personal trials, how she could not configure the face on the canvas into an expression of happiness despite labouring at it for a long, long time. That is a seminal experience the artist is confronted with and must stare in the face. Something about this really isn’t up to us. I feel disconnected from painting lately. It seems all the colours I use enhance or harbour darkness. Even with a palette of vivid colours in hand, my intuition flattens them. I’m struggling to love the works and the work. The muses do not take kindly to self-deception.

XX. Have my standards surpassed my abilities or have my skills surpassed my standard hand? Maybe my language no longer contains me. Maybe my language no longer contains me.

XXI. We did arrive naked.

XXII. Artists wander toward wherever the slightest threat of a feeling presents itself.

XXIII. My dreaming in its epic totality will return to me, it must. Does in dribs and drabs through influence. Last night I was swimming a channel, a friend ahead paddled a canoe. A shark’s fin appeared and I knew my fate, but called forward in a bid for the other’s awareness anyway. My final thoughts were over whether the nature of my death would even be known; if so, in what state the body would be discovered or whether I’d become one of the disappeared. The person rowing did and I woke. For several nights in a row now I’ve risen at the hour of the dead.

XXIV. Love is stronger than time, than nights taken to flame, than reality. Woe had I, lost faith or gained it, lent toward another court only to wake this witching hour upon the pyre of a dream where he and everything crushed against mine. A rare thought and less likely. We’d be as two rock faces giving way the same path after centuries glaring into one another over vast valleys.

XXV. When woman disappoints her suitor scarcely any significant change occurs beyond that of attitude. Primary to mind remain all the same parts, what’s different is the position from which he’d approach them.

XXVI. Crushes are vile, they produce fixations within the mundane and send all dignity windward. The last refuge of a loser is the prayer one’s obviousness reads as endearing. Responding quickly registers internally as a fatally telling knee wobble during an important dance. A single typo rings the death knell of a mystique you never possessed. Your questions sound Hinge-level stupid. You want to see a single pore on their body through a microscopic lens, their unmade bed, an apartment complex blueprint or piece of hallway drywall. You want some sawn-off stairway railing from the first home they hated—anything the other’s run fingers along to stabilise. Of the person, who is really always more a figment of the imagination, you think please.

XXVII. What I really want to achieve in this life is a laughably small sort of cliff note kind of a thing, but I’ll utilise all at my disposal and remaining days to better the vessel through which my mission might be made possible, that one aim basically being as totally futile as all this (my right hand lifting my left mid-air and letting it drop). The aim is basically to make work that well enough excuses me. I want to be forgiven my leave. Ideally I’ll endure the pleasure of it in quiet dark far from concerns over the comfort of any attendee, by blood or love whose grief is generous only in bargaining an extension of my own.

XXVIII. With a winnowing mind I was jogging before bed one night days back when the euphoria of revelation widened every hole in my sieve and set free the confusion I’d been performing anguish over. Word carried by a rough seafaring voice I’d heard amidst many a storm before cleared an old, faithful way in my mind again: It doesn’t matter what they do, it matters what I do. Always. The truth is so readily present for panning. There’s a good thing in me, yes nested, at times entangled and outwardly imperceptible—covert in its bloom with a face for long seasons unrevealed even to me, but nevertheless steadfast and incorruptible. Its endurance will be tested on earth for as long as blood runs red in my body. It will endure.

XXIX. All types across the personality spectrum serve the conscientious person. Observation is key though the word sounds, in a way, crudely impersonal or remote. Brings to mind a magnified eyeball clinically trapped inside a telescopic lens, rolling detached from the drum beating blood into chevrons about its iris. The heart matters. We heed it for its wise and tireless plight drumming good things up in us and others. Its enduring rhythm tallying neither each folly nor laurel beckons, in aim to cling soon to the tail of its other’s sonar. We harbour rhythms off-beat by design to flood the gap between that of our counterpart’s and forge a lineage.

XXX. A cylinder of paint rolls over in my palm as I consider its namesake: the sun creeping six degrees below the straight in a collision of time and colour before daylight splats its belly roll over dark’s wide grasp. Dawn shuffles forward to flatten our primordial terror eliminating nothing while we paste equally fearful things upon day’s opaque.

XXXI. Thank God it hurts, that means I’m still in here.

XXXII. I’ll always trust another Pisces unreservedly, like, even if one tried to do anybody wrong I’d be like careful, you saw that.

XXXIII. A gallery showing of colourful abstracts, hundreds of colours on each as usual but it’s a pitch black space. Whenever anyone lights up their phone torch loud hissing begins below their feet.

XXXIV. I’ve been holding my tongue all year, my writing is suffering and my forearm is covered in drool.

XXXV. Heed, some words to power spoken once heard cannot be undone, friend, for He’s tone deaf making no rounds to check whose tongue wags in jest.

XXXVI. I’ve watched the moon arc across the sky, observed it laid back and laughing to my right, to my left then beheld as it turned over on its head again. Some nights I need you to remind me we’re not alone. If this is my nature, and I too am chained to the same off-centre patterns of predictable chaos, how do I best use this to illuminate the darkness? Preserving energy, recharging, slowly drawing all inward like a tidal warning. What else maims the perennial diplomacy in a person quite like having little to lose? and thank God, thank God, I say: strip away my tact, too. Watch me tread hard, incur then squash the sharp edges. I am an expanse, so much larger than rented flesh. Make me real. I heard a stranger say she wakes each day and feels alive. My youngest cells still remember what that feels like. People tread with such caution. We’re so light we keep each other at bay. Let me speak, snarl, bite, peel my tongue across your face and forgive.

XXXVII. Fairweather folk aren’t friends they’re loose ends. Take a lighter to the fibres.

XXXVIII. This year has shattered my heart in ways I never could have imagined would feel so totally… banal.

XXXIX. Sitting in silence, it’s the indifference of specific people I reckon with. Who ever broke anybody better than a friend whose heart has forgotten? Whenever the temptation strikes and I fantasise kicking out my own chair it’s never lamenting a lover. I hope bitterly to leave first, that for one day you’ll remember.

XL. It’s an awful, fleeting and ultimately futile thing the world demands of me and I want it equally.

Pulling Up The Floor Tiles

Laura Richings — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 07:14:15 GMT

The idea of arguing with passion and perseverance against the existence of anything tickles me. What are we doing here? Is not God present?

"Let me guess, your “relationship with Faith” is like never sighting the heat system beneath your feet but anyway basking, flexing your toes on it. You’d press the significance of feeling the warmth of what's below, a knowing through bodily sense that somebody has in fact threaded the wiring. Nearby in some mountainous rubble of a landfill lot there rots one materially prudent receipt for 1x Hotwire UTH Mat 6m2 900W, with the last four digits of your literal fucking credit card."

Contended to watch you dig, I wouldn't engage in a conversation about whether-or-not what’s felt is real to begin with, though I’d redirect my finger to the thermostat.

When I divide, it's through intent to commune; to see know touch maybe taste and become the sticky stuff connecting all else. The friction between ideology intrigues, but does not urge me to involvement. Maybe I'm covered in buttons with fading ink greased by the hands of one too many philosophies. An aging, slow-reverb of electrical delay—fated to take my rectangular place. Beneath all this bickering. There in our weakest or meekest moment finally arrives the strength required within to pull up the porcelain.

Melbourne

Laura Richings — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 11:20:14 GMT

Industrial bins are dragged and kicked over in the sky.

It’s grey it’s blue—grey again blue it’s grey…

Half-empty drums roll like tumbleweed through
indecisive mist and the culprit’s yawn echoes.

Looks like rain.

Expansion—contraction. Dull explosions.

Some say the Gods tussle to keep fear alive—
we do just fine.

Rumbles seem to begin from beneath my feet, but
there’s nothing sharp about it.

Melbourne weather’s like falling asleep on a foreign sofa
beneath creaky wood as tenderfeet make step—
separated-by-two-second step toward relief.

Whatever’s going on upstairs, I take the hint—
it’s none of my business.

Photograph by me. Artwork by Anonymous.

The Empty Room

Laura Richings — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 13:16:20 GMT

I'm not an easy person, asking if tasked with writing about The Empty Room—“which?” becoming consumed.

If I were consumed by the empty room, it mustn't be.

Peering in would suggest the room had a window.

“Is it impenetrable?” Breaking its glass to know for sure, I’d infiltrate and spoil the concept—filling it with auras of an outer world long pressed against it... alongside the jagged fruits of my curiosity.

“Is it windowless—do we hover above it?”

To see, to prove… the empty room mustn’t weigh a roof.

I’d slinky a measuring tape down like a long braid wondering how tall the walls are—‘cause if they're regulation walls I must've suddenly grown tall… and if I'm so big then this world isn't the one I've come to know, at all!

The emptiness climbs free. Disappointing.

If the room were a windowless, sealed cube of transparent construction, I'd surely catch many shadows cut across its naked floor… myself mirrored back, standing inside too, glaring—perplexed.

I’d deny its emptiness, again.

How can a room filled with shadows, duplicates and disappointment be sold as empty? To write about an empty room and make you care, you'd have to feel encouraged to envision the loss of something valuable that once was.

What if it's not my responsibility to make you care?

But if tasked to?

In working to conjure Nothing within you, it seems prudent to work against the summoning altogether. Hmmm seems almost as though to know my empty room… you must forget.

Such is my disposition, I couldn't write precisely about The Empty Room in even earnest attempt, so quickly coming to doubt its existence.

Frustrated, you’d exert yourself to convince me, then once everything’s said, done and undone again—would we not find ourselves confined within yours instead?

In Lieu of The Other Thing

Laura Richings — Sun, 25 May 2025 09:35:25 GMT

Craving wasn’t a motivator but I’ve waged, won and lost enough inner wars to suspect something hungry’s numbly under the surface. All the time. Funny how losing feels like something complete but winning rarely satiates our sense of closure quite the same way.

This beast’s new enough its belly’s in development. Paws at me without yet remembering its eight daggers—so casually I’ve indulged its every whim. Hadn’t seen cause to bark or bite yet.

Six bodily days of absolute bone, nerve and joint weakness as if my foundation were built of thin dry strands of spaghetti pasta pressed bowing into gravity. In the shower I stood at 30 degrees with none of the class and all the pressure of being Vertical.

This has become a habit stemmed from cyclical stupid human hubris and a serious magnetic pull to being up when no one nearby seems to be. There’s no will to ruin myself, I just…

Backspaced the truth because it sounded as self-involved as it was, removing even more dignity, sketching a total caricature of whatever cliché of a bonified literary bachelor I’d last idealised from afar.

Playing himself in a biopic I sat through in some Heritage Listed theatre, shifting rigidly in my heritage listed seat. More a dollhouse accessory now, swollen leather air pockets where the cushioning gave up. I’m deflating.

Why are we here? This movie’s free on YouTube. “Ssssh, look at the ceiling!” Rolling my neck instead.

Being a person is mostly inconvenient. This news is no new news to my lower gut. Cognition now provides all the comfort of an underlined date in print, on death row.

My body is inconvenient, its needs are inconvenient. It’s unsightly by virtue of how apparently inconvenient it is from inside it.

This is the wrong way to look at things, obviously. To regard my only mechanism for achieving my will, the impediment to my will.

Will. My mother named me after a writer. Laura Ingalls Wilder. How much of this idea is—has ever been mine? My eyes sharpen instantly. Unfortunately, all of it.

Unfortunate, because this way maybe ain’t so Good and good’s not Nothing.

Good’s more admirable than holding artistic endeavor closer than the receiver. Especially when it’s her, other side of the line. Gentle voice brave and sad and distant … and she’s fearing for your soul but never hints it.

Space junk drifts.

Be decent. Marry well, get pregnant. What’s my purpose? The hard labor of men mends the distance briefly between You and She who built it.

It's funny, I’ll call myself An Addict without speaking from a removed place linguistically (“I've got these tendencies” or “the gene”) when it comes to tobacco, sugar or caffeine but when it comes to this?

For half this month I’ve been bedridden, intertwined with paranoid delusions. If I told you … maybe you'd punch me into enlightened horror through the screen like YES LAURA YOU’RE RIGHT ABOUT IT.

LOST/FOUND

Laura Richings — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:48:01 GMT

There was an iPhone glitch the other day (it’s actually been eleven months, I am a LIAR). Notes dating back around 2018 appeared on my own device, here they are. Haha. Posting my backlog… I dunno. Haha.

17/6/19 I set my vision to optimism and dial to thirty where my hair is long and I am not here. Your whole life could change so suddenly, but it probably won’t.

26/6/19 The T at the end of every word bounces.

27/6/19 I feel like I’m betting on a legless horse with no money and a latent disdain for blood sport. What the fuck am I doing here. I do not want to be here. Except, some mornings the sun creeps across my wooden floor boards and I bow to the rays and they pierce through my apathy and

25/8/19 Imagine explaining time to an animal.

4/9/19 I think about it almost more than I don’t. Piling all my stuff against the wall in boxes I’d finally planned something to completion. Anybody with a place to go, would not stay here. The people come, but don’t clean up. Paperwork. No formal investigation necessary. It becomes somebody else’s story—their bad day or appeal for pity. Eventually someone would post my bedframe online and awkwardly disassemble it. They’d borrow a drill when the screwdriver was inadequate, like we did.

9/9/19 Everything happens just before it does.

13/9/19 “Can I play something for you?” That sentence always invoked a shy disgust in me. A red cheeked embarrassment at the audacity of anybody daring to aspire before my eyes, but not when you said it. You barely spoke, most of what I learned to love about you came from observing the way you are. I wonder how I’d ever begin to explain what we were. You taught me not to need to. I said nothing and edged closer in compliance. Most of my interactions feel so manufactured. I gaze through a green lens, observe whatever people are driven to create when they feel something and all I can do is soak in my imagination, wondering what that’s like.

21/9/19 “What’s wrong with you?”
“The opposite of whatever’s wrong with you.”

22/9/19 Solitude is regenerative. I walk long cold strips of cement in dark hours past explosions of laughter, lights and clinking. I urge myself to magnetise but always have a better place to go alone. Where am I to take myself, bound in time to others, when not to stretch out these various paths feels like ripping chords from the jelly of my gut. So it is, palm to wound and walk. Solus.

28/9/19 On the tram along Hawthorn rd. the driver slammed the breaks, a man cursed him and called him an idiot. I smiled, not because he was angry but because he was scared.

1/10/19 Everything I love about this place I’d corrupt if I stayed.

9/10/19 I put a lot of thought into my lyrics VIOLENT GURGLING.

16/10/19 God wasn’t God.

17/11/19 Last night in my dreams I found myself walking across a grassy oval through shit and cum and blood and fisting and bunk beds, piss and people filming themselves so I started to run before being stopped by a group of people who live there. They wanted me to interview them to share “what it’s really like” in their community. I spun around and an American man asked what language we speak. I could not remember. Jung, what’s up with that?

22/11/19 [Written in notes, at a club, shown to a friend.] I met a dude and feel
shy

22/11/19 The anxiety got the better of me. I wanted to hold this guys hand a lot. A lot longer. I’m home now, it’s 4:07am. I’ve delved into ritual to avoid a negative comedown, because I am so scared that my mental health was already so frayed and fragile, now I’ve sent a surge of good things through my brain and it will reckon with that, and the emotions will be real and I’ll wonder why I do things. Is it possible for me to have relationships and be intimate with somebody? Anx.

22/11/19 At some point I realised we don’t really capital K—know anything, any of us. Maybe that’s a foolish thing to say but all we have is whatever we choose to believe. I having fallen fatally in love with the impossible path to perfection’s mythical sanctuary, simply cannot stand this and have become numb. I used to march at rallies and engage in dialogue about my passions. I do not know myself, this nihilism.

7/1/20 042******* Jasper

19/1/20 The time my back was in so much pain I couldn’t walk, he asked for a massage, and I fucking did it.

25/1/20 The inside of my head is a black background with a 3 dimensional nothing spinning on display. There’s nothing there, I can’t grasp without fabricating the image. The sun came out today, I can’t believe it, it’s been so long. It rained orange, the arms of my denim jacket rest atop a dusty rooftop table. Is the country still aflame? Do we even care?

7/2/20 Dig yourself out of this one. Your pen is a shovel. Begin. Use your gift, use everything at your disposal. Don’t conjure up images and cast a rosy tint upon them.

17/2/20 Primum non nocere

26/2/20 Sorry I had to listen to six albums before I could respond.

27/2/20 [I didn’t write this.] Remember neb the one that had you babe [sic]

29/2/20 I’m sitting here behind the wheel of my car with a lit cigarette and I’m drunk
I know I’m drunk andI’m sitting here waiting to not be drunk. But I want to go home or to someone who feels like they’d be my home. But I can’t. Because a police car just circled the lot then left and I know they could be just outside this lot, waiting for me to come out, drunk, and they’ll take my car away and me away and maybe I want to be taken away. But really, I want to go home.

29/2/20 Supplies are running low, infants and the elderly… we’re next. The ones with no self control. This virus—incentive to keep my tongue off credit cards, as if fentanyl, petroleum, stigma, overdose, gang warfare and poverty hadn’t covered the bases.

6/3/20 You told me to die so many times, I saw every single one. Should I kill the parts of me that search for you?

10/3/20 [Last line was embarrassing to paste.] Someone calm but strong, someone who can read a room, someone wise with endless stories, someone who has passions, hobbies, respects animals and art. Someone who notices me.

28/4/20 For two years I’ve walked this strip, this street without realising it’s a living breathing fucking organism.

3/6/20 Diogenes proved that motion existed by walking away?

3/6/20 You only get to know people when they stop telling you who they are.

10/6/20 All my toxic rearing its head. When’ s my boyfriend coming home / is he my boyfriend anymore / what happened the other night / don’t ask questions you don’t want answered / guess it’s over, my fault. My brain just hurts. I feel ugly and unwanted, lonely and sad and I don’t have friends to drink with at bars and he’ll stay out nights until he disappears for good one day while I’m at the laundromat. I smelled his shirt when he came home and touched myself while he was in the bathroom, picturing him doing the same thing.

11/6/20 I don’t want my most sincere prayer to be during crisis. I don’t want all my longing for you to be during your absence. We were in the living room and you said seeing is believing, it’s harder to have faith in something you can’t envision. So I envision us. And I have faith.

9/6/20 The hard emotions hit much harder at 763, there was something about that house. It felt like a direct line to heartache. Like the shadows cast upon every wall had somehow sunken in. It was all too recent, I can’t believe I lived there yet I still feel the weight of my body lugging up the stairs. You don’t really look at me, don’t kiss me and you’re angry when I call.

20/6/20 If you won’t reveal every angle of a current manifestation of self—in understanding of its ephemeral nature, stuff strengthens in private darkness like fungus in the fertile ground of that allocated black in both souls. Have you ever considered ripping the tangle of roots straight outta your soul soil with one hand, salting the earth with the other—waving The Truth around mid-dinner at the next gathering so no one can turn away anymore? and so that which lives in the dark is collapsed in the light, all of us walk away a little more honest. I mean community. We don’t heal alone.

4/6/20 I said I get turned on by ideas and that wasn’t a good enough answer, but not only that, I never answer anything, ever? He can’t get to know me because I am potentially purposely hiding my true responses?

18/8/20 He’s been coming to bed before the sun comes up the last few nights, and reaching over to hold me. I couldn’t enjoy his embrace this morning, becoming incensed with frustration over it all. He thinks I have little faith in him, but didn’t tell me about bills and will not send them to me even though I’ve been asking for three days. He seemed to take it personally, “what, do you think I’m lying about the amount?” I woke up and anger flowed through my body because he still hadn’t sent them, he’ll sleep in ‘til late and I wont have a chance to approach the issue before heading to work.

19/8/20 Always stuck in the mindset like 'I’ll be happy if - or I’ll be happy when -

11/9/20 Pro: taking baths without worrying someone may walk in and see my fleshy belly floating above the surface after eating too much Rice. The cat’s undivided affection.

12/9/20 Feelings I’m sitting with and attempting not to engage too intimately: Unworthiness, failure, ugliness. Fear. Big fear. Big, Loud, Capital F. Fear. When I’m in a room by myself I feel like I don’t exist.

13/9/20 “Go write about it.” A message or a threat. Catharsis, communication or retribution. A means to an end, a route, an alternate place. The mother ink in my veins, the body sliced in two. Just an attempt to let the medium flow through.

24/9/20 My boss yelling in my face today over NOTHING didn’t bother me at all, didn’t even stress me out when I lost my fucking keys and had to literally destroy my locker to get in so I could text you, but knowing you wouldn’t believe me then you Not Believing Me bothered me. It did not surprise me.

27/9/20 The colours of hope.

5/10/20 I love you so deeply and you wouldn’t know from how I acted today. Uncertain whether I’m most afraid of losing you as a man in my romantic life, a loved one or of you being totally indifferent toward me. Having you test me again and again is confusing. One day you ask if I think we could be together again, which I feel like I’m clearly working toward, even admitting I want, then you’re giving reasons you can never be in a relationship with anybody—rehashing things I can’t change from before. Then you ask, “Am I the one?”

5/10/20 I don’t want a relationship with anyone except this man who will not accept my love.

10/10/20 Guy meets girl traumatised from a masked robbery / finds out it was him.

13/10/20 I dreamt of wild fruit in my garden last night; plump and attractive, attached to vines that spilled romantically onto the pavement and choked the outer panels of this house. Tangled around a neighbouring weed, two improper opposites meet intoxicated by coincidence. It’s been suggested there’s no such thing, that we track ourselves down again and again before finally submitting to total apathy or settling respectively for the inane, the final masquerade of peace, the muted buoyancy of a dull and adequate love. Passion and it’s reach meet nothing.

13/10/20 Oscar Wilde, commas after the word AND, adjective rich.

16/10/20 Time is a bucket of leeches.

26/10/20 I adore those features, I can’t even hate you. I’d love to be long limbed, small waisted with milky skin. You’re bright eyed with a mane of chic inferno, and educated. I am me, you are you. Thank God. If he loves me I don’t care whether he desires you, too.

16/11/20 [Quote] “My eleven year old daughter was in Agnes Martin’s apartment, admiring a rose in a vase. Agnes asked "Is the rose beautiful?” She said “Yes, it’s beautiful.” Agnes removed the rose from the vase and held it behind her back. She asked, “Is the rose still beautiful?” My daughter says “Yes.” Agnes then says, “The beauty is not in the Rose, it’s in your mind.”"

17/11/20 This isn’t a sad story. There comes a moment in most lives where the ideal is shattered. Purity, security and fairness are the most difficult illusions to heal from.

6/12/20 Your music paints a space on my brain I never knew existed.

2/1/21 When will I be ready to move on, because I know someday I will be and that’s what scares me. I ignore men when they pass flirtatious commentary my way, monitor my drinking and I can’t fucking masturbate.

10/1/21 I feel truly delirious with the amount of love I’ve received lately and from the amount of people who’ve smothered me in it. Even more bewildered still, by the individual and collective caliber of magnificence all these people exhibit in their strength of character and compassion for those around them. I’m in love with each and every one of you. There are roads we walk alone, but ya’ll have been wandering parallel with hands outstretched and I finally feel you. Thank you.

12/1/21 I fell asleep on the end of Jack’s bed tonight, woke up and he was about to stroke my hair away from my face to wake me. It wasn’t quite panic, but I almost felt betrayed. I’m not able to accept affection like that lately. Walked outside for a cigarette and started crying because all I want in this world is not to be desired by anybody and I can no longer discern that from true tenderness.

13/1/21 I feel so small.

15/1/21 Treat Melbourne like it’s your boyfriend.

22/1/21 I hate you and hope you die. I hope someone murders you and whoever you fuck next. I hope everything you ever dreamed of presents itself in your hands, and you destroy it. I hope you have a wonderful, happy, joy-filled life and figure out whatever went wrong and I hope you’re happy right now and that you feel the sun on your neck and I hope you are viciously loved and looking after yourself.

31/1/21 Without solitude, my empathy switch malfunctions. I harden. It’s frightening, but the world still embraces me. When I know it couldn’t be darker in here somebody sees a light flicker within me. They don’t smell the gasoline. With softness charred, I stay busy building replacement parts. Evict the ghostly dwellers in the spiritual tenements of my body, they cave in the walls on their way through but my foundation is strong. I swear they never really leave, they pry me open, they wear me.

1/02/21 I love you, and I like you. There’s this space inside of me for you and there’s one in the world without you. I insert you there. Ever present. There you are on the pavement, posts and fences but never worn on other’s faces. Sometimes even your face is not your own, and you’re most beautiful to me when devastated. You’re devastating. That’s what you are to me.

5/2/21 I get why you’re an Artist, now.

7/12/20 Bold of you to assume I’m concerned whether or not you come home.

9/12/20 I can’t deal with this stuff anymore. Everything I do is a problem, everything I say. When my friends offer help it’s a problem. I ‘dated’ a dude for three months a year ago and it’s still a problem. It’s affecting my work, my ability to be myself and talk to friends, to relax. Everything is a psychological fuck around.

11/12/20 I’m starting to spiral, nothing makes much sense. My memories are cracked, my words are cooked and my heart is choked.

13/12/20 This street feels like a game of minesweeper.

15/12/20 My knees buckled but my legs didn’t fail me so I kept walking, and it’s crazy to me that emotions affect our body so intensely but—they do and some days they’re the only sign I’m alive so that’s alright.

17/12/20 [The lyrics to Omerta by Lamb of God]

22/12/20 You literally dumped me after doing lines with other girls all night, said you were clearing your head, I was off work sick and cooked dinner, she slept in your bed. Why the fuck am I concerned with you? This whole thing was bullshit to you, “not out to intentionally hurt you”—Fuck off.

23/12/20 Slowly you lose that charm, that childlike laughter withers away. Always on guard—must seem so measured; controlled, controlling and prude. In wait of the next horror and you’ll be damned if you’re the cause. So, you dim yourself—until it’s so dark even you can’t see what’s inside. Whether there’s any You left to bare witness to. Send an echo down the hallway of your soul. Hello—are you still in there? Not until it’s safe. No response. Not until you’re free. Then, one day the slide of a foot against the sound of nothing, movement against a darkened cell wall. She appears. Hesitant innocence in eyes that question, is it safe? Can I speak? Are we free? Curls shining in the light you deprive her no longer; you face one another. No words exchanged. The mourning is over, but you both hope you never again abandon one another.

24/12/20 Words are magical. Fall for them over and over. Destroy. Rebuild at leisure.

27/12/20 I stayed out later than I wanted to because I wanted to be anywhere with you.

29/12/20 Held me like an animal caged then told me not to bare my teeth. When I snarl, everyone will hear it.

31/12/20 No dark history, no uncertainty. Tracing every section of one another, no judgement, only love. Imagine that. Imagining a lover but not longing for one.

Ten.
Nine. I’m fine right now, but in two hours time…
Eight
Seven. Where was I this time last year? I honestly don’t remember.
Six
Five. I don’t recognise your face, nobody does.
Four. I’m not sure what’s real or where to go.
Three. Alone.
Two. Good riddance, the year of hindsight.
One

5/2/21 I knew that if I spoke to you I’d tell the truth and I knew if I confessed I’d get in trouble and jeopardise my relationship, but no healthy relationship should be jeopardised by the truth.

5/2/21 I don’t know whether it’s harder for me to see reminders of you everywhere I go, or harder when I don’t. I’m trying to work through our relationship and get over my romantic feelings for you. I don’t know how I feel, but pasting [tag] everywhere you know I go makes it worse and I think you know it. Do you think I don’t think of you, constantly? I don’t know if you hate me, or could give a solitary fuck but have you told lies? I walked past [redacted], said hey casually and he iced me like I never existed. He stayed in our home. I don’t go to your places or stop and chat with your friends. I’m not malicious, manipulative or deceitful—I don’t know what level we’re on, whether we’ll ever speak again. It’s hard to comprehend. Wish I never let my love for you tilt romantic, that’s where I ruined it. We’re obliterated. I care, and where do I put it?

5/2/21 Just get on with it Laura. You waste so much energy on men.

10/2/21 Sign in a cafe: “many people have eaten here and survived”

12/2/21 I hate the empty longing of dependencies held. I look back and try to imagine when I ever felt loved. I don’t remember being held, at all. What is there to miss? I miss no one, nothing. I’ve always been the one to meet someone where they are and stay there with them. Now I love this isolation. I think if I were to sleep with somebody I wouldn’t kiss them, but I don’t let anybody touch me. That wasn’t love, unworthy in someone’s eyes, repulsive, coming second to drugs, alcohol and ego. But at the bar, you’d place one hand on my thigh for reassurance…

12/2/21 You were so angry when the illusion had shattered. We were in my car. You’d been so perfect in my eyes, now it was ruined. Your insistence. None of that was true. You’d have to start over with someone new—eventually they’ll see beneath the mask too. Where will you hide? Get loved, idiot.

14/2/21 You’re dishonest, mostly to yourself. You play the victim to receive sympathy from women, the criminal to attain respect from men, but they all see through it. You’re so weak, so broken, so tragic and sad. I see you, I don’t feel sorry for you, you became a lesson.

21/2/21 You turned me into an enemy. An enemy to myself, in my home, in my mind and to you.

22/2/21 You could be the annoying commercial people talk about because they hate it.

24/2/21 Is my hatred toward you somehow ambiguous?

24/2/21 Sometimes the streets smell like carnival potato.

26/2/21 It’s not about want. I want a lot of things. I don’t think I can reconcile my absurd love and extreme distaste for you. My body feels physically sick when I think of meeting, it’s confusing, so I say no. My gut says no, I asked God and God said No, even my heart squeals a desperate plea that my mouth utter: No. But yeah, we should totally catch up for coffee soon, just so I can hear how great you’re doing, then go home feeling like garbage because I’m still resentful and hurt while you’re just fine. Then I’ll spend X amount of hours reflecting, dealing with my own guilt over someone else’s happiness without-me equating-to the subtraction of something core in my own inner wellspring of value, which is already running fucking shallow.

27/2/21 We rebuild these beautiful parts of ourselves over time but not through maintaining contemptuous relationships that breed only potential for deeper veins of resentment to form. Let them live with their poor last image, much the way you’ve been forced to live with less of yourself.

28/2/21 How can I be in your life and not see what I envisioned with you, and where you’re going alone? and what we actually had, and what I ended up with? I am too full of resentment.

5/3/21 I deny [redacted]’s positive attributes because I am heartbroken. I cannot live with it anymore. I don’t know how to put it poetically. I just hurt when I try to love you. I hurt when I think that I had eyes only for you, saw a better life together but now it makes me sick to speak to you. I’ve been angry because I can’t face the alternative extreme. I don’t want my anger to give way to sadness. The past few days I’ve been spontaneously crying over you, and it isn’t specific memories because honestly we fought more than we didn’t, but crying over the illusion of what we could have. I’d never been so sure about someone in my life and you said THIS was all you’d need. You offered everything I wanted in a man, plus elements I never knew I needed. I know it was an illusion, and still never expect to feel this again. I am heartbroken.

6/3/21 What do I care for dignity now, in your eyes I never had any. Who cares for the last word, they never seem to mean a thing to you, à la Depeche Mode: meaningless and forgettable. But I would’ve followed you anywhere, thought we’d go everywhere. You said everyone dies alone, might as well do life alone. Love can be fatal.

7/3/21 The mortality of others is none of my business.

10/3/21 Some sounds extend the space around you, some enclose you, some drain you while others fill you the way a lover may.

10/3/21 A tram stop on Inkerman and Chapel. A fluorescent man at Caltex stacks crates of soft drink onto the truck. He slips a tailor between his lips and I bore of him. I notice the man beside me in brown corduroy slacks, grey silk socks and black soft leather loafers. He stares at me longer than etiquette deems polite and I wonder what’s on his mind. Does he notice the irony of my Sea Shepherd shirt and lit cigarette? He slips his hand into his blue windbreaker with a subtle gesture, begins to fling grains of rice by the handful onto the pavement surrounding his feet. Six Pigeons immediately pick at them with a desperation I recognise and watch, wondering whether they’ll really explode.

11/3/21 I make myself so much sadder than necessary, can cry so easily. When I consider that someone did love me but handled me carelessly I break into even smaller parts—but when I tell myself it was some sick game from the beginning I can move mechanically forward. Maybe you need to break everything up to observe it thoroughly enough. Maybe if you understand the function, you’ll figure out the bugs.

31/3/21 You weren’t someone to love, you were someone to answer to.

1/04/21 Don’t you understand? It’s always now. It’s never not now.

9/4/21 Liz Phair said in an interview it’s hard to find someone who understands her lifestyle, history and art. Women like us aren’t for the faint of heart.

9/4/21 Everyday I wake up and it doesn’t immediately make sense. I’m heavy like the ocean floor. I’d sit in the sun for an eternity listening to the chaotic ramblings of any honest human being. I’m listening to Joe Cocker’s ‘Little Help From My Friends’ he’s singing me sunny.

10/4/21 If you see me around, you shouldn’t come close. I won’t rest 'til I’ve taken some skin home.

12/4/21 I had all these feelings words couldn’t express, so I used colour to fill the space I used to crowd with them. I had this morbid feeling I’d never love again. That I wouldn’t get the opportunity because I’d never move on or become a whole enough person to love somebody in a humane way. Pushed closer to the edge, I’d peer over that merciful abyss with a compulsion louder than all hearts beating within earshot including my own. Who has time for love on their deathbed and what is more important than love on your deathbed? I just feared I’d never love again. Is that okay? My ex expressed these fears I’d move on easy and privately, I’d thought I would too. But I woke yesterday from crying in my sleep and sometimes my mind is so full of static I envision myself wading into the ocean screaming until I get too deep to find air. Generally if I feel rejected, I become so cold I shock myself, but I am a romantic person and I’ve always been this way. Wrote my first dumb love letter in the first grade.

15/4/21 To be honest I really do hate your guts, it would separate me from myself to even feign civility. You wasted my time, treated me like nothing, lied about who you are and dragged me through hell.

23/4/21 The tram pulled to a stop and you must believe me, I saw, as I peered out the left side of the window, a littered newspaper blown open by the wind. The headline read “Life can change in an instant’, it’s midday, life, plenty of time for the sudden change but I resign myself to the edge of my bed, cursing what I deemed a personal affront by nature. It’s grey, so everything else seems subsequently so. I suspect if I headed back out there, I’d too become brushed with monochrome. I wish to bargain, to trade places with the nearest town touched by light today so that I might feel again the warmth and see again the colours of our world in all their vibrance. I served a customer who responded to my small talk over the misery in such an optimistic, honest way. She said "I’m fat, so I have extra fleshy layers like a baby seal, so I despise the heat and live for this chill. Isn’t it great we are all so different from one another?” I’ll try to consider this woman whenever I’m tempted to complain about the weather in future.

23/4/21 Our time together was a record skipping over the same spot
again
again
again
again
I will never know you
again

10/5/21 Sometimes when it’s cold and I feel the breath shudder out of my mouth the way yours used to, I feel you inside of me. Sometimes when I’m still and feel my heart thump, I feel you inside of me. Sometimes through subtle gestures, I believe I’m becoming you.

13/5/21 [The poem “Echo (All She Lost She Lost)” by Leila Chatti]

20/5/21 He said the idea of me not being okay felt like needles beneath his fingernails. Well, I’m not okay. Haha.

7/7/21 [Quote] “A writer — and, I believe generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all, is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” - Jorge Luis Borges

24/7/21 You’re still living rent free in the southern most broken region of my heart. Your nails pierced holes in delicate walls, my bolts all loosened to roll. Those broken boards forgot how to touch, everywhere I go I rattle with us.

26/7/21 [Quote] “There are endings so sad I want the morning light to scourge the fields. Endings that are only what the river dreams when it dries up. Endings that are constant echoes.” - Richard Jackson, ‘Alternate Endings’

20/8/21 I want to use words sharp enough to castrate you.

24/8/21 I’m in bed with A Lover’s Discourse, ate almost an entire bag of jelly beans. I always pile the black ones separately to enjoy one last shot of aniseed. I wrote a little tonight, it seems to get darker as time goes on. It’s like there are two of me, always have been. People keep having birthdays and I resent them for it. I want to be alone, am alone; want to be more alone. I dislike when men look at me like I’m the answer. I can’t remember anyone’s names. I need to return my colleague’s Cat People DVD.

25/8/21 I draw thick from hatred’s magnificent pool.

8/9/21 Tree limbs like witches hands twist from the earth and line my street, I imagine as soon as I walk away they’ll pluck at the powerlines overhead like chords on a Cello.

14/9/21 I walk like a pair of scissors.

17/9/21 The most fearful of thoughts erupt, the ones you dismiss daily. That you’re actually as vile as you’ve always suspected, that disease will feed on all your bad habits—that you’re altogether undisciplined, unskilled and carry nothing to offer anyone. You’ll only ever be wanted by conmen but loved by none. You will not bear children or worse it’s all you’ll do and badly. Nothing can change your fate which is to fade away painfully, slowly with no dignity. You’ll age terribly and it’ll be all your fault. Every person who ever harmed you still laughs behind your back and even when you’re desperate for it, you’ll never give or receive love again.

21/9/21 [The poem ‘Fearful Thing’, by Judah Halevi]

24/9/21 [Quote] “If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me. You are not taking any notice of me at all. God forgive you - all I wanted was a few words from you.” - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

26/9/21 My ex followed me on Instagram at 1am lol555999P [sic]

7/10/21 My back feels like something magnetised to me. Or like I’m wearing a jetpack with no fuel. I need a fusion core.

16/10/21 Today I laid staring at the ceiling for hours. Slept that horrible daytime kind and woke only when somebody tried to push me down some stairs. They were coming up, I was on my way down. They struck me hard on my right shoulder and said sorry, but I responded “Are ya?” sarcastically, then kept on without looking back, then felt another impact as they launched a more deliberate blow to wrestle me down the entire flight. I felt simultaneously stuck and violent. I woke in the same state.

16/10/21 Measure the weight and length of my words, someday say my heartbreak had worth.

26/10/21 When he leant in, enclosing, and stroking my hair, I sat there unwilling, rigid and tense. He asked how nice it was to be touched by another human being, but I couldn’t look and didn’t bother to speak.

29/10/21 [Graceless Host]

23/11/21 I know I speak with a plank in my eye.

3/12/21 [Quote] “I have found no other justification for my life except this effort to create. For almost all the rest, I have failed. And if this doesn’t justify me, my life won’t deserve absolution.” - Albert Camus

17/1/22 Tomorrow call bank or die.

18/1/22 You were the carborundum stone.

22/1/22 [CLIPBOARD] “Would you like to stay in touch via WhatsApp or whatever? My number is [redacted].”

7/2/22 There’s something I’m not sure you’ve noticed, but it means a lot to me. There’s no door between us and never has been. There’s no polite or guiding goodbye, goodnight or good morning. In medias Res. A continuum. I’m afraid these words will conjure the absent barrier. There’s a respect for one another’s silence and appears no latch, lock or expectation? Boundaries unbound.

19/2/22 Under the shadow of doubt, I relearned how to speak. In weathering misunderstandings, grew a comfort for their inevitability. An attraction to secrecy and respect for code has grown. I am dancing with the universe, we are both blindfolded. [Redacted] told me recently that keeping secrets today is a revolutionary act. I thought to communicate indirectly was a gift I did not possess, but rather I possessed an intolerance to perspectives against mine I’d intended to communicate. I intended for others to understand my writing as if they were my replica. The labyrinth is one of my own construction. Those who already claim to observe, yet form beliefs are already trapped inside with their opponents. The confusion. I am not, after all, a bystander in the destruction of what I love.

19/2/22 I’m sitting in mums Jaguar, she’s driving the back winding roads with wide views of green dome-like mounds of mountain, I wish I could share it. I’m in the back seat, her passenger just said if someone told her years ago, she’d be living in a million dollar home, she’d never believe it. “That’s for rich people!” My own mother says maybe they’ll do something with the property, attach a second home to lease. I chime in where normally I’m silent, and tell her not to sell her soul, though. I say what they do affects the community, too. Her passenger says “Once they allow buildings higher than sixteen stories, I’m out,” she says people get greedy, don’t appreciate what they’ve got even when it’s rare. I remember all our apartments, moving further and higher out of town. Now she drives the Jag, which she calls “The Jag”, because her partner bought it very cheap and fixed it up. When she drives it, sometimes I wonder whether people think she’s a wanker. Sometimes I wonder whether she’s becoming a wanker.

17/02/22 Remembering the body communicates its needs, I wonder why mine suggests I swallow the ocean. Is this what they call the mind’s corruption? This renewed ease in turning away? Is living in accordance with the true nature of things to devour, after all? Perhaps I am to rewrite the mind in order to allow others leave with their lives. Swim free, you functional scaly holograms. Reprogram me, I want the flicker of system failure just long enough to fall off the ladder. Maybe I’ll wake as a pixel glint in the eye of some anonymous user’s design. I can barely reason with deniers of reincarnation, it’s all that’s ever made much sense to me, naturally. I saw the Vulture on screen at the movie theatre last night and cried in silence. What gives any the grand belief they’ll come back breathing? Maybe I’ll return as the moment Donkey Kong’s adversary realises he’s been struck by a barrel. Just one pause out of trillions of indistinguishable discoveries.

23/2/22 A new freckle fell from the sky and landed on my arm.

26/2/22 I can’t bring myself yet to contest my peace, it has been so long wandering toward this clearing in which I finally find myself and I know I’ll not stay long, for even if I do, time will eventually overtake. The sun and rains will tempt the clearing into overgrowth and I will become again entangled. So I’ll just sit here, drag neither guilt or grief unto this field.

8/3/22 On my street the trees are emerging through the asphalt, victorious. Reclaim us.

15/03/22 I wake at intervals in defiance. In dreams I am chained inside frames that make me make sense to others. I wake at intervals to poetry unfolding faster than I can tack it down. I wake at intervals as What I am. I strip in my sleep, waking naked and for an instant I can see. I wake with a saintly grace, then forget myself—or, remember.

15/03/22 People don’t want to be wrong about even their worst assumptions.

17/3/22 Some people had no chance against intellectual thought. He says I’m to wait two weeks for the next book we’ll read together. I like to visualise laying beside somebody reading our respective books in peace, reaching over to pat the curvature of soft linen every so often, just to be sure. In this time I’ve read Lispector’s ‘An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures’, a story about Lori, a disconnected teacher who meets a philosophy Professor who waits. People don’t wait for each other anymore, I’ve been guilty of the impatience. What happened to courtship? I’ve been reading Andy Warhol’s book. I read it a decade ago, when I was different. I’m so taken by what reads as his accurate portrayal of his own aura and presented vision that I’ve sat the book down to contemplate what I’d say of myself. How could somebody so fixated on nothing, be so well drawn? Where does the time go when I do this? I devour it, yet it shits me out? Okay.

18/3/22 My friend said, “Mirrors don’t work for you like they do for other people.”

23/03/22 Intimate understanding of another has only ever been a brief illusion, a beautiful idea. Temporary commonality found on grounds ever shifting. I believe we are alone.

4/4/22 How many times do people think they can dismiss you and expect you’ll still open up about your inner life to them? How many times can someone mock your belief system, judge and mischaracterise it, claim to hold the answers as only a radical would and find you capable of coexisting? How many times can somebody grandly declare their appreciation for all your tolerance and grace only to decide along each nearest whim of convenience that, actually, they’re too—or more—unique—dismissing. People think love bombing isn’t sincere, unfortunately, it most often is. That’s why it works. People think devaluing is a momentary lapse, but that too is authentic, at the time. I don’t want to hear how great I am, the negative cycles back around and I hear the same insults again. If you think I should ignore recurring behaviours that impact me negatively, when you exhibit them compulsively, then you’re the problem. My problem is that I believe words have the power to explain this. No one should expose themselves repeatedly to people who don’t respect them.

17/4/22 Triumph of comprehension.

You’ll Know Who, You’ll Know Where

Laura Richings — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:40:44 GMT

Yes, on his way—cloak dragging through the bone gravel and gristle of a number never tallied as the concept of score keeping is an error inherently human. Come, come. I’ve been and will return as those black birds circling together and separating—settling ashen over the limbs of the eucalypt body water-logged as if frozen—you know where—trapped in the grey imprint of above.

He Said

Laura Richings — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:39:18 GMT

To drown, it never got loud enough. I want every kind of love, pressed against every shapeshifting body. To step inside every building with every communicable ontological knowledge of form and non-form and non-knowledge and wisdom and witchcraft—the how and why and why one should never. Just so I can tell the others. I want to reach the end of every line and… dive. Driven by something greater, more sinister than compulsion to bathe in every atomic ocean. Garnished by salt for ancient predators to bloat, sink and rot with parts of me in their bellies like the parts man has left to spoil within mine. I beg for the ultimate knowledge from another God I promise I’ll remember this time.

Scarier In Single Digits

Laura Richings — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 22:46:30 GMT

As her name whispers in wingspans spread throughout the mesos, Melete remains deaf to my milkweed call. Word alone survives distance. How many pearls must I pass passed my lip ‘til the coded sonorous note breaks with its rhythm and slams open the vault door to risk a fatal exception?

97% Visible

Laura Richings — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 17:19:09 GMT

Please kiss me deep into suburbia. Tonight I lay by the roadside in soft high grasses and if not for an engorged moon, the fat Golden Orb hovering in her web above my face would’ve risen with it. Army roll. Palm to wound and walk. Everything happens just before it does. When the white owl appeared he did not face us. We swerved

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Seeing, Knowing

Laura Richings — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 19:15:39 GMT

After a tense build-up—will he, won't he come—how hard—cyclone Alfred dumped the eastern coast of Australia. Still, it's been raining for days.

A glossy, angular black Magpie landed on the sloped limb of our moss-sweatered macadamia tree. He stared at the red-feathered idiot on the lawn next door poking along the fence line—the chicken hadn't heard of anybody else. Two ducks with disappeared necks perched upon fence posts further along. A third paced, patrolling between them on the grass below. They watched while the outer edge of their dam expanded, eyeing a colony of ibis birds who picked apart the disturbed earth on its new outer limits. A king parrot landed on the railing beside me. We played a while. I moved closer, he fled, he returned, etc. Each time back toward the hundred foot fig tree with its all-hours view into the living room.

Is all this watching—watching others watch and watching ourselves watch others watch us and trying to look watchable while unaware? or humble? Does the chicken know something? All I know, is I didn't speak the parrot's language, but knew. You know what I mean? Me either, but afterward I bought bird seed. Let’s ask the chicken.

End, No End

Laura Richings — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 18:59:38 GMT

end, n. conclusion, cessation, completion, fulfillment, attainment, finis, period. purpose, aim, object, objective, goal, reason, motive, motivation, intent, design; destination, final cause, raison d'etre embroilment, n. discord. confusion, derangement, involvement, embranglement, ~~entanglement~~, Inf. mess, Inf. a heap of trouble. end, coup de grâce at loose ends unsettled, drifting, dallying; confused, uncertain, wavering, Inf. betwixt and between, Sl. not together no end Informal. very much, considerably, Inf. a lot. summon, v. call, call upon, instruct, demand, exact. assemble. serve with a writ. Often summon up a. rouse, arouse, provoke, impassion b. recall, revive, fan the embers, rekindle, retrace, review, look back upon, keep in mind.

Thumbnail Image: work of Gilbert Garcin

The Will and Vengeance of Forgotten Memory

Laura Richings — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 08:36:10 GMT

A spry shadow knocked its will against a relic and I caught it. Upon impact in my palm, a thin masque of resin flaked away from each eyelid. In denial they tightened. Once a thing in and of its place with no mission nor mouth, the memory grew loose and gained will. Burned. Under shuttered light in the womb of my curled over hand, a smaller set pried themselves free of the silence. It was too late for lullabies—the “why” was in process. Defiant fists formed, knocked aside the rising rockpools and beat its shallows swollen. A rogue wave collapsed across the bridge, smoothing years of lashings in an instant. The memory, liberated from the flat linens of certainty, walked back the rot of its integument—then threatened to wake the rest of them.

Has one thing ever happened and had the decency to stay there?

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February 15th

Laura Richings — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 01:26:41 GMT

Advertising hasn’t changed, it’s still tried and true Hofstede but this one rode my nerve. A woman frets over last minute Valentine’s plans for her man.
“Forgot—again!” Enter [product placement] to save the day. She apologises, she’s fallen short. “Shyaww,” the boyfriend consoles—it’s the thought.

Reciprocation’s important, we all love differently and should talk about it, but I’ve never met a woman requiring a calendar reminder to display she sees, knows and considers her man. Maybe it’s my fault for surrounding myself with great women, if I’m wrong chime in, but from what I’ve witnessed, ladies typically even concern themselves with and prepare for men’s concerns about disappointing them and ask for nothing or flowers, yet still most at some point have heard, “Flowers only die—the day’s just another capitalist psy-op.” SNORE.

Give her this day and she’ll bake the daily bread. Swipe a single flower from a neighbour’s garden, show she’s there when she’s not. She isn’t? Plan. Set a timer: pretend. Affective empathy’s out this season anyway. She’ll love the wilted weed you pried free from cracked asphalt. Something beautiful obliterated for me?
As the stem slimes over and stinks up Ikea glass, she’ll clip its end, freshen the water and tend to it as if this were the last blooming plant on earth and when near enough dead, she’ll crush its petals between pages blurring the prose of masters.

Then she’ll search through sections of your iPhone you never knew existed. Spontaneous romance? You’re suddenly highly suspect. If it’s a no-win situation, what’s the recommendation? Do nothing! Stew as usual, guy, lest you jeopardise every sad lover girl’s true treat: February 15th.

Heads lowered, women enter work by the millions uncharacteristically pensive, appealing to the sympathy of Stock Nice Guys they work with.
“Hey bud, what’s wrong?”
Synchronised response, “Oh… it’s nothing.” Forced laugh—jilted—brave. Assessment rendered: homelife’s off. Activate: Saviour Mode.

Lo and behold later the she’s arrive home clasping their trophy: the withered reject of every other girl’s special yesterday: a tacky bow-tied
🇨🇱🇪🇦🇷🇦🇳🇨🇪 bouquet from—not that spindly soft cock from her job? Surely not.
“…said they’d only go to waste! Aren’t they lovely, wasn’t that lovely, isn’t he lovely?—” Dot dot dot. What a set up.

Do you:
A.) Sulk in front of the T.V. set resenting how close she held the evidence of a penciled-in betrayal to her chest—imagine hers against his while she climbs the countertop in your periphery, still speaking and reaching. Shake the vision loose and “forget” to come to bed.
B.) Argue the creep clearly wants into her pants and always has. Peel back the scab on her “idiot” wound and rub one salty fingertip into it. Find yourself staring down the barrel of her wits: “…You’re saying men are never ‘actually’ friends with women, or kind to them without sexual expectation? As in, I’m worth nothing beyond my body to any of them?” Now she’s getting it. “—but, you have—” Fuck this, she never listens.
C.) Unclench your teeth, realise you’re on the same team, move to reach the glass vase she can’t without bruising her knees, find a way to make up for yesterday’s cynical tirade and spoiled day, confess to the fear you’d fail her and having doubled down, see she’s beautiful aglow and from an effort so miniscule that next time you’ll be the reason: act like a better fucking person—unless… she’s not immediately over it?

Ah, rookie you interrupted. She hadn’t finished praising what’s-his-name; hadn’t been given time to build toward a silence tense enough to imply that now it’s your turn to swoon over Mr. Limpdick Simp spending a grand total of ~~$12.99~~ $6.50 TAX INC. on someone else’s bitch.

D.) Scoff. Ask how she thanked that fa**** piece of shi* and push the vase farther back on its shelf. Head to the bar for another all-nighter shouted by the local girls—they’re just mates!

Men, if you’re gonna pluck a beautiful flower by the roadside this Valentine’s Day, make it more than a metaphor. Women, stop mistaking sulks for deep thinkers and cancel your subscription to their TAX INC. excuses.

I’m serious, it works.

I Swam Not Once This Summer

Laura Richings — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:52:35 GMT

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A turn, waxing light
Petal melt beckons black scent—
we swam not once in

Fat hot months, weighted
The well rope here’s frayed, heed these
two weeks ‘til breakage

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Words Are Insufficient

Laura Richings — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:20:55 GMT

Why paint? It’s as Yukio Mishima said, sometimes, “words are insufficient.”

When I first started painting, it was through a need to express during a time writing was an unsafe source in my life and from the beginning simplicity was an element missing there, which some astute people were kind enough to point out along the road. Trapping each of those voices into resin beads, I threaded then wore them around my neck, there where they’d hiss or whisper during moments of doubt and throughout my every failed attempt at visually manifesting someone else’s version of aesthetic congruence or pure, holy, simplicity.

Mindful of composition and balance, but bored by perfection and driven by intuition, by nature, I cannot limit myself in medium or palette and must remain wildly undisciplined in curiosity to honour its call. To remain active, I should allow for deviation, but the repetition in my latest approach to painting has allowed the most peaceful period of making visual art that I’ve ever experienced—at one time, my every effort to make something pretty failed so miserably that I choked myself coating every canvas in black aerosol paint, tossed back my seat and walked the streets for six hours; I declared: painting is what’s wrong with me!

Many times this hobby has sent me reeling and will again, but lately my process at the bodily level each day in the studio is known. Mixing, crisscrossing and laying solid colour over colour over colour. No ambition nor study of technique necessary. Within this discipline, freedom. Some great drawing advice that I heard from a creator years ago, was to pick a subject and draw that, over and over. Not only do you see the growth in technical ability, but the expanse of imagination available in the repetitious approach of one subject. The power there, is the removal of decision paralysis. Instead of sitting at your desk as a creator each day depending entirely upon your inner idea machine—which causes so much self-doubt on days the cogs won’t turn—you know generally what you’re doing each day, while allowing for creative freedom within the subject’s context.

What began honestly as a means for venting frustration about events that I couldn’t come to understand in conversation with anybody around me, became an unconscious colour study disguised as an aesthetic marriage of pigment striking tally marks on the canvas. A series presented itself, now my mind is not there and my studio has turned into a true playground and reprieve from the intellect.

At first, painting a series is this magical natural culmination revealing itself, unfolding and making itself known to the artist, all new and joy, then becomes something of a commitment. It’s an affair turned marriage; along come children with unique personalities and maladies but the theme or artist’s personal style if strong remains visible beyond the immediate mask; the works are related: palpably family. Sometimes the bloodline ends, either the “story” is finalised, or the idea’s abandoned its host, sensing shallow investment. You ever had a brilliant idea, you swore you’d get back to? Where’d it go? I recently filed away some complete pieces from my studio when I found myself looking to them compulsively while painting the next. Through this attachment, each piece began to lose its individual integrity and the whole ordeal mirrored my own identity struggle, my horrible tendency to compare or consider myself an extension of others, losing sight of my agency.

Process/showing the working out is as important to me as it is to a math teacher or historian, but writing about painting is difficult and maybe to your gratitude, you won’t see me too often do it. In the past I believe doing so has been perceived as an act of betrayal to the practice, seriously, which in response for a time, abandoned me. There is such thing as writer’s block for painters, and where the block in (at least, my own) writing tends to suggest a personal failure, a block to the abstract painter feels as a targeted, personal attack. Any thoughtful artist will tell you, their works or ideas have some will to live; are teaching something—I think very often we fail to access the lessons available by yielding to pressures to offer a premature synopsis. This is where we’re prone to regurgitate gallerist style bile disguised as thoughtful expositions on work we do not yet fully understand; and may honestly never. I do believe then the work retaliates. Therefore, I’m grateful for my ignorance of what unfolds by my hand at its will. What I’m learning in the process translates; offers suggestion for how to proceed creatively beyond the canvas. It’s no stretch when I say this, my painting practice offers insight on my writing, also; is not sourced from a place too far removed.

Just as my focus in developing as a writer has never orientated toward being published so much as writing lines worth binding, my concern around selling paintings branches less off the prospect of rejection than wanting to create work worthy of standing behind. Visual art should keep its pet artist’s secrets, should ultimately speak for itself. Too often, I worry in advance about the stench of my fruit's rot when it's not yet ripened on its vine, let alone landed upon my dish. Abstract painting decimates planning, helps relinquish any idealised message or outcome, is incredibly healing through its somatic route and knows things you don’t. When you’re lucky, it lets you in on it.

I recommend painting, highly; especially to control freaks prone or prey to perfectionism. Flipping your chair and taking a six hour stroll around the neighbourhood may also do the trick.

Old, sold painting shown in thumbnail, “Cursed Bloom”

Netter’s Anatomy Flash Cards

Laura Richings — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 10:21:06 GMT

I’m flicking through the anatomy flashcards I bought for $15 from a used book store in Fitzroy while listening to fellow commuters as they perform their respective, externally branching conversations. “She dressed up as the Wilco album cover… wasn’t it 1992?” Another man describes his self-deprecating thoughts over the phone, “…incoming car when I stepped onto the road then thought, ‘should I move?’ Too dark?” I smiled, might’ve laughed. The skin on the back of the neck receives innervation from the dorsal rami of cervical nerves.

Later, I’m trying to convince myself I’m fine missing out on Lamb of God’s sold out show tonight, making the mistake of listening to Omerta while scrubbing dishes. I get pretty fired up while washing dishes to begin with, it’s where my greatest arguments have seen victory. I had tickets (back when you could hold them) to see Lamb of God back in 2013 when they toured with Meshuggah and didn’t attend; no idea why. I’m squishing the Scrub Daddy’s little smile ‘til he grimaces uncomfortably and realise: this is how I’m really feeling. After draining the sink, a God-thing happens. I search up an event post from weeks ago on Northcote Theatre’s Instagram and notice someone commented two hours prior regarding a ticket; a response from the venue with a time stamp of eleven minutes ago states there are 40 tickets available at the door and to get in early.

Now I’m in the uber with wet hair and dry hands refreshing a third-party ticket sale site, just in case. The radio’s programmed to a religious channel. “You’re listening to 89.9 TheLight, if you’re tuned in to this station, you live in the Light of God, give the blind the gift of sight - we need fifteen more doners… here’s a song by Ed Sheeran.” “DAMN IT!—Sorry!” For blaspheming. I’d just missed a ticket. Sold 5 mins ago to Saif. The line’s around the block at the theatre, long. I sit across the road alone, biting my lip while clicking refresh over and over, attempting to breathe in a way that indicates I’m not actually alone. All of the intercostal muscles keep the intercostal spaces rigid, preventing them from bulging out during expiration and being drawn in during inspiration. A bird above makes a disturbing sound, I can’t see it for the tree foliage. In a bold move, I stand in line with everybody else and hit refresh on my dimmed phone screen, eventually telling the guy behind me my deal. He shakes his head like I’ve got no chance in hell, and so does the person in front of us.
We’re slowly herding forward when I notice the international signal of a well-connected person; a wire dangling from the ear of a well-postured man. I launch from my station to ask whether there are still tickets at the door and he pulls the dangly thing from his ear—breaking the code, becoming disconnected. He asks why I didn’t simply bypass the entire line to head inside and buy a ticket. Absurd. I’d have to have hubris. Heart sounds (lub-dub) occur from the closing of the valves. Making no eye-contact, I patrol past three sides of a cube of people to ask the security guard ushering people inside if I can head in to buy a ticket. “Go ahead.” The desk attendant says, “You’re all good,” I have to remind him that I haven’t paid yet.

Inside the venue, the sceptics from the line remember me, approach and attempt to embrace me, as if my being one of them has been authenticated by entry. Nodding them away, I move toward the stage then lick my finger to pull a pill from the prescription bottle of Propranolol in my purse. A guy beside me says, “Don’t make fun of my beer, I lost my prescription bottle of meds,” I look at the beer, it’s just a Jack Daniels; I don’t understand. My confusion speaks for itself, spread across my face. He adds, “My prescription bottle of Valium…” then says, “if I start getting dozy you can drag me some place and have your way with me.” The skin on the back of the scalp receives cutaneous innervation from the greater occipital nerve (dorsal ramus of C2). He thinks I’ve stolen his meds. “I want to see the show.” I turn away and consider pulling out my bottle—popping a few to make him feel like a cuck watching his drugs melt against my tongue. I’m bored by his approach, opt not to set things straight. A wet force strikes my shoulder from his direction. The Mylohyoid nerves help depress the mandible or open the mouth. They are active in mastication, swallowing, sucking and blowing.

Polite Abandon

Laura Richings — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:31:47 GMT

The heartbeat of every confession the writer let live only slung over that cliff's edge—tongue-tip, thrummed stronger on that lip; lived as every life's threat; fatal as a fall into a never ending affinity. The other had rendered 🇹🇭🇪 🇼🇴🇷🇩 insufficient, empty. Illuminated emptiness, its beauty—something to wrest from the grip of her every fluid intuitive negation. Each coded crash landing consequence of another upturned granule of zero slinking through the hands of the fool daring to sculpt its form. The truth, perilous today as it had been during the pause between farewell and 🇪🇳🇩 🇨🇦🇱🇱 grants no admittance. Shocks the soft flat landscape of the writer’s skin into peaks surveyed in balance by and by the million of them. Changes nothing. Sudden as lightning—his barefoot exit unheard, still she knew like an animal stirring from rest, glancing toward what hasn't happened yet. If a silent echo woke the cat, could one not also rupture a glass heart?

Pathological Rumination

Sapere Aude

Records, Profound and Banal Part II.

Records, Profound and Banal

Pulling Up The Floor Tiles

Melbourne

The Empty Room

In Lieu of The Other Thing

LOST/FOUND

You’ll Know Who, You’ll Know Where

He Said

Scarier In Single Digits

97% Visible

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Seeing, Knowing

End, No End

Thumbnail Image: work of Gilbert Garcin

The Will and Vengeance of Forgotten Memory

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February 15th

I Swam Not Once This Summer

Words Are Insufficient

Netter’s Anatomy Flash Cards

Polite Abandon

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