10 Comments
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Sharmila Ganapathy's avatar

Thank you for sharing, and the respectful homage to Andrea Gibson. They will be missed by all their fellow poets.

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augmented man's avatar

thank you so, so much for your kind and uplifting words, Sharmila. let's keep her spirit alive in the lines we craft and the communities we nurture

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Augustine Ruiz's avatar

Pain is temporary. Words are forever. Share both so others can feel.

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augmented man's avatar

but here's the paradox, sometimes words are the temporary ones, shifting meaning with each reading, while pain leaves permanent marks in how we hold our shoulders, how we pause mid-sentence. Maybe that's why we write: not to make pain eternal, but to transform it into something that can change shape. Every time someone reads our words, the pain becomes something new. Not forever, but infinitely renewable. Like a door that opens differently for each person who finds it

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Colin Jackson's avatar

This is why I can't delete my drafts. They know things I don't know yet. Thank you for putting words, that peculiar grief when hovering over the delete button, knowing I'm about to erase a future I haven't lived into yet.

They're not failures anymore. They're time capsules from tomorrow, waiting for me to catch up. I finally understand why they felt smarter than me. They were

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augmented man's avatar

every draft is just tomorrow's memory of today, waiting for the right version of you to arrive

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Demiurg's avatar

Reading this feels like finding a fossil of an emotion that hasn't evolved yet

I'm saving it for my future self to excavate

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augmented man's avatar

if it's a fossil of an emotion that hasn't evolved yet, then we're living in its prehistoric era right now. We're the dinosaurs of someone's future feeling. Save it well. Your future self will need proof that even before you understood, you knew

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Karl Stokau's avatar

what if every unread notification is just a door we're too scared to open because we already know we're on the other side?

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augmented man's avatar

Your question just rewired something in my brain. What if the fear isn't about opening the door, but about admitting we've already walked through it?

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