Sonder - Tumblr Posts
Obscure Emotion #1
Sonder - n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.
Under Black Light
John Poppleton, from California, creates incredible works of art painted directly onto human skin using fluorescent shades of lilac, orange and green and then photographs them with stunning results. His project, called Under Black Light, consists of ‘bodyscapes’ of spectacular natural phenomena such as African sunsets, tropical oceans during rainstorm, and mountain ranges under moonlight.
Word of the day:
Sonder
The realization that everybody around you, even random strangers, are living a life just as complex as yours.
My stomach growling but I'm phvcking styling
Spent my last 20 drunk, and Uber riding
Ain't nobody cutting checks, if you ain't happy smiling
That's shit takes all the talent, yeah
And it ain't easy, let me tell ya
Account is overdrawn
Doing sessions in the valley every other night
And it goes on and on
“This that roll myself a J and count my figures sh*t, this that stepping out I’m that n*gga sh*t”
Drop the roof and let the smoke clear…
Every time when my friend offers ride back home after office ,I refuse looking at the 9.p.m dark road. They never understand why I walk after such a long day. The Street lights hide between the tango of leaves, that intentionally hide the sky from my vision. She dances like a mother trying to distract her child protecting and preventing from the horror scene behind. It is as if the trees knew the starless sky haunts me.
The filtered neon lights falling on the street sway like waves of oceans, the shadows of drunken trees rinsing my feet, the tar bed of the road holding my walking shadow like a whale swimming away in the ocean.
I walk past the demolished site. It once must have carried dreams, scaring away the dark. But now all I can see is Ghosts of those dreams. I believe the building passed these dreams to someone else, because dreams don’t die... or do they?
Between the busy cars and broken glasses I walk carefully leaving the silence behind. The fast world running, pushing me in front. Now, I enter the narrow street that holds my building in its palm, I’m forced to face people. The stranger woman who look at my tired eyes with concern about my health. The unknown men who stare my long dark road and worry about their daughters, might be somewhere might be returning from work or might be heading into the night. I see girls like me who cross while x-raying my jean pocket bulge. She’s probably thinking "Well, another battery dead phone, that’s why people look at people no a days, isn’t it?"
Then I reach my place, my bed my space where nothing from the day gets unwrapped from head but things from 10 min walk spread over the sheets! Now, tell me what does a ride give you, back pain?
How sweet and beautiful it is,
My friend,
My love,
To have lived a life that brushed past yours.
a perspective on sonder
Sometimes, I wonder how one can be so close-minded. Selfish, even. Basking in the dying light of a summer evening, letting it wash over my face, I silently watch as one of my friends swats mindlessly at a small fly. It's small, harmless, but they smack it down without a second thought, and I can't help but wonder if that fly had a little family somewhere out there, waiting for it. A thought pops up in my bored mind: is this fly, probably not even able to fully grasp the concept of being alive let alone other living beings, even really conscious? My brows furrow when my companion kills it in one quick motion. It might be pretentious of me, yeah, sure. It's not like I've never done the same, but I do, just for a moment, feel sorry for the little life. Had its crime been invading personal space, or, as so many artificially empathetic ones have said before me, was it being small?
A campfire crackles in the distance with the people who lit it chatting cheerfully, sat around it. Slowly, I descend into the wild grass, stretching into it and feeling every little blade on my skin. What do I gain, pretending I care? Seeing beautiful, tall flowers freshly cut down by machinery, wondering whether they had wanted to keep on living for a reason other than pure instinct. They might not even have that, do they? I deeply mourn the loss of something unfamiliar, a stranger; something people consider a weed. So should I, and yet I don't. Maybe I do it to feel morally superior. Maybe I just want to elevate myself from the rest, pretend like I am in any way better. Neither of those reasons makes me any less selfish than my peers, whom I condescendingly looked down upon; rendering me the very person I tried so desperately not to be.
It is strange to think about the fact the lives not so far from mine can be so, so different. Really, it is pretty obvious, and yet I vividly remember seeing my neighbour in some odd place, breaking my perception of them as just my neighbour, something out of my field of vision, completely, forcing me to realize that they're so much more, have an own life, an own soul. A person that probably sees me as just their neighbour, like I did moments ago. It is apparent and logical, and yet I was, embarrassingly enough, never really aware of it. Sighing, I rise to my feet, grazing carefully on the lawn. The warm, salty breeze flows over from the sea and fills my lungs.. Soft waves crashing on the shore, I look over to my fellow sheep again, tormenting and being tormented by flies again.
And I wonder if humans would ever understand.
the sky the morning of my birthday this year ♡
did anyone else form a very personal connection to the diary of Anne Frank in middle school and feel like you were holding your breath your whole fifteenth year only to realize you were outliving her, continue to outlive her, continue to grow like she deserved to and you die a little inside or is that just me