She wakes up a few minutes before she quits dreaming...

...Like the flame of make-believe sleep hasn’t quite gone out yet. Seeing the world like this—through some sort of curtain—is strange. It’s wonderful. Touch, especially, is magic. The sheets on her naked legs. The cool air leaking through the open window. Her skin touching her own warm skin. She pulls off the sheets and stands and smiles at her own body and thanks her bones for being put together in exactly the right ways. She wants to run down the hall and laugh and cry and shout and dance. All of that tension and elasticity in every thread of every muscle—magic.

Every morning, first thing, there’s tea to be made. She feels the poetry in her routine. There’s a rhythm—teapot, faucet, water, stovetop. And it’s in the silence too while she waits for the water to boil. The bubbles begin to rise and the magic builds. The day is an egg waiting to crack or a balloon sitting on blades of grass."

-Lovely writing from my new favourite Tumblr, "What We Are Supposed To Do" - every day, there's another beautiful post! Here are some of my favourites...

“I know—but—listen. Every one that I love is a piece of glass. A prism. Each one is different—because no two women laugh the same or sleep the same or talk the same—and I lay all these pieces of glass out and the light bounces through all of them. It bounces to you. It lights you up. Maybe that’s how love works for me—it’s reflected through everything and all of these pieces of glass are what make you—so—bright and I love you.”

"No one can know what a life whittles down to in the end, but the long procession of days probably doesn’t boil down to a single moment. But what about as long as we can hold our breath? Or the ten minute walk from your street to mine? Or a stretch of hours lying in a field tasting the onion grass from each others’ skin? Or a single night beneath the junebugs swimming through the black summer sky and your apple breasts bobbing in the dark water? Or a perfect week or month or year? We cannot know what will hold the meaning in the end.

But my guess is that those handful of days with you are the pit inside of the fruit and flesh of my receding youth and all the years to come. And no matter who you become or where you go or what you do or who you are with, you are where I will make my home. I have a shovel and ax and I’ll build it with whatever I can find, be it ink or wood or air, and afterwards I’ll lie in our green yard and drink tall glasses of cold water and guess the season by the tastes on the wind. And in the end if your life boils down to those same moments—when we both felt stuffed with cotton picked from the same golden field beneath a wide open sky—then you know where I will be."

[And I really think this is the saddest thing I have ever read:]

"There’s a body crying in the dark, and a strange body puts its weight on top of her, and she thinks of the old body that used to do these familiar things. She cries and the strange body becomes even stranger but she wipes away the tears draining into her ears with the loose bedsheet and manages to stop thinking long enough to let the bodies do what bodies do. She does not sleep but by morning the unfamiliar body beside her is little less strange. The day passes quickly and without thought, and then the night is there again and there are less tears this time. She tells herself a body is just a body, and when the weight comes into her again, she nearly believes her own unspoken words.

I’ve been the salted tears leaving trails on cheeks and I’ve been the salted tears pumping into the secret folds and both are pretty awful when stirred in with all that strangeness. But I’ve been that old body too—the one that used to do those familiar things to her but slept too late one spring and got left alone in the dark—and nothing is as awful. Nothing can be as wretched as those helpless epiphanies that wring out the half dozen organs a body didn’t even know it had."

So beautiful. Speaking of which, Laura Marling was marvellous live - and so were her support acts. The Boy preferred Boy and Bear, a brilliant Australian band, and I adored Alessi's Ark:

"You're lovely
Yes, you are
You're very different, you know
You're very magical, you know
You'd melt me if I was snow...
If your body is the sky
Then your freckles are the constellations...
Hell, I'm in love with you
And it's true
My branches, they turn to you
Asking you, do you love me too?"

As for today's challenge - a thank you letter to someone who has changed your life - I have already written one to almost everyone who has, and any more would be overload!

And grazie mille for all of your May Ball dress recommendations - I have to say, I saw the most divine dream of a dress in Jack Wills the other day... the Winchelsea dress...

...Oh, to find £298 at the end of the rainbow!!

Love, candy stripes and petticoats xx