20160729

So I was hanging out with this girl I liked one time. And as we were laying in her bed just about to kiss for the very first time she just gets up and runs to her closet. So I’m just sitting there waiting and she grabs a stethoscope. And she comes back to the bed and places the stethoscope on her heart and gives me the ear pieces. And she goes I want you to hear how fast my heart beats when you kiss me. And it was seriously the most beautiful thing. Moral of the story…everybody buy a stethoscope.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160726

What is heartbreak? It’s when you thought you had forever on the clock, and the other person decided to stop time. It’s everything, and then nothing, a cold hand, and silence on the other end of the phone. Wanting to say good morning, but instead, having to greet the day, and everyday, with no one around. It’s the knot in the back of your throat, the warmth and stickiness that a tear leaves on your cheek; but in the end, it’s growth, and weakness learning to be strong.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160724

On the good days, I feel like I get it, like it all makes sense. I can stay in the moment, I don’t have to control everything in the future, and I believe everything is going to work out fine. On the bad days I just wanna grab the phone and start dialing numbers. I want to pull my hair and run through the streets screaming.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160720

I have way too many aspirations for one life. I want to be an author and a poet and a nurse and a flight attendant and I want to own a cute little coffee shop where people come to write or read or just exist and I want to sell everything I own and just travel sound the world and I want to live in a super small town where everyone knows each others names and I want to raise my children there and I want to be a tattoo artist and make my body into the master piece that it deserves to be and I want to travel to Africa and build houses and I want to become a doctor and cure cancer and I want to be be a dog trainer and an astronaut and I want to be a photographer and I want to be a journalist for a major magazine in New York and walk everywhere in heels and go to fashion shows on my days off and I want to be a counselor for teenagers who struggle with mental illness and help them the way no one helped me and I want to be a kindergarten teacher and a stay at home mom and all of this is too much for one lifetime and that’s the problem.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160715

Does she scare you a little? Good. She should make you fear her love, so that when she lets you be apart of it, you won’t take it lightly. She should remind you of the power that beauty brings, that storms reside in her veins, and that she still wants you in the middle of it all. Do not take this soul for granted, for she is fierce, and she can take you places that you never thought you could go; but she is still loving in the midst of it all, like the calm rain after a storm, she can bring life. Learn her, and cherish her, respect her, and love her; for she is so much more than a pretty face, she is a soul on fire.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160713

Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you “fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. I’m not saying this because I need a place to stay. That’s the last thing I need. I told you, I’m a walking man, but I been heading in this direction for seven years. Walking all around this place. Upstate, downstate, east, west; I been in territory ain’t got no name, never staying nowhere long. But when I got here and sat out there on the porch, waiting for you, well, I knew it wasn’t the place I was heading toward; it was you. We can make a life, girl. A life.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160707

“I hate him,” she swears. And her hands clench into fists, so tight that the nails create little crescent shapes in her palms.
“I hate him,” she promises. And her hands shake so violently she has to steady herself.
“I hate him,” she repeats. Once, twice, three times. “I hate him.”
But even a stranger could see by the fire in her eyes that she does not hate him. A passerby could take her hands and the little crescent shaped marks and see his name scrawled into her skin. She does not hate him. But she wants to, oh she wants to.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160706

I think the sign of a true soulmate isn’t someone you just want to do the super cool stuff with. A real soulmate is the person who makes any ordinary day fun. Some people make all these huge plans to do with their special someone, fuck that. Find someone who you can take grocery shopping and still have a blast with. Find someone who makes you look forward to waking up on Monday.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160704

When is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture. But when had you last a great conversation, in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plane… a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterward… I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing, like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160703

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of the human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement, There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future–you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160701

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160630

Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita

20160629

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

by Kenneth Kataiwa Batanyita