Letterbox - Submissions to oasisromantic@protonmail.ch

date: 23rd of July, 2021
name: Subdoodly Doo
subject: Hi
message: Hi does this work? Also what do you mean by guestbook

date: 24th of July, 2021
name: Joghn
subject: website
message: came here looking for dirt, instead found a really charming and quaint little neocities site

10/10

-joghn

date: 2nd of August, 2021
name: Nyx
subject: Kaleidophilia
message: hi melody!

i found your website through your discord profile (as I have already told you on discord hehe (*´ꇴ｀)ﾝ ) and was enraptured by your poetry. i really find your way with words and with the world beautiful. your life seems very free to me, though i am aware that i am not at all aware of your actual life situation and have only seen your more romantic, wanderlustig side.

your short description of pen-spinning really captivates me. i used to "sing" the balisong (after multiple suicide attempts my parents threw em out so i don't anymore o(╥﹏╥)o ) and i used to describe it as a song myself, with notes strung into melodies, weaving in and out of each other into a kinaesthetic tapestry, a synaesthetic song.

you seem to be pretty interested in poetry. i've always wanted to get more into poetry myself (*although, i do take a rather phenomenological approach to poetry, and all art, seeing poetry not as a class of text/speech separate from others but rather a mode of interfacing with a text, any text, regardless of the poetic or utlitarian intentions surrounding its creation. but i am talking here about, like, actual poems ppl write to be read as poems, not just experiencing poetry in other media or "in the wild") but have never really known where to start, and have never really been much of a reader to begin with. i really liked your poem about your first time smoking weed. it was charming; rather impressionistic, plain and simple. i'd love to read more of your poetry if you have any you'd wanna share. i've written a few poems myself, though most of them kinda suck. here's a short one i wrote a few days ago, after rewatching A Brighter Summer Day, that i find decent:

半夜的月亮、
人造
grainy jet sillhouettes eclipsed against
the golden glare of lamps illumining
vibrant verdantry impressed upon
the velvet midnight blue—
a syzygy

i think part of the reason i fnd poetry so hard to get into has to do with the way databases have rewired the way i interface with a lot of art. it's something i've been aware of, concerned of, for a long time, but that's generally more of a background concern until something brings it back to immediate attention, but reading through your teahouse section and checking out the music you listen to brought it back to the front of my mind. after listening to frill i felt a compulsion to find doll on rateyourmusic to find out which album of theirs i should listen to next and catalog and then when i couldn't find them i realized how stupid that was and simply pressed play on their popular tracks on soundcloud. this indexomania really started with anime and later became most pernicious with film, specifically experimental shorts, where i would avoid a filmmaker's works that weren't on letterboxd for me to log and arbitrarily limit myself to what was loggable. i only made a rym in march and i already got to this point with music months ago (⌣_⌣”), before i used to be fine with discovering and listening to whatever the fuck i wanted, generally listening in the unit of songs rather than albums. i don't want to abandon those platforms though, as a lot of my favorite works are things i only ever learned of through them. i just want to keep using them without the toxic mindset they bring out in me. even as im writing this i am listening to a specific recording of Má Vlast that i was able to find on rateyourmusic. why am i like this?!? ლ(⌯˃̶᷄ ﹏ ˂̶᷄⌯ლ)
ocd sux
(im glad im not like this with paintings tho, for the most part)

also, i really really relate to that little section about your college in "The Grasslands". i went into college as a computer science major—having decided on programming as a career since middle school and thus having the majority of my high school career organized around that and feeling as if i had to continue on that path, as if i couldn't change course, as if a younger me's vague interest in computers had become part of my identity (the horrors of definition, the toxicity of ātman)—but the corporate air of those computer science classes was suffocating and i found my most interesting and most fun courses by far were courses unrelated to my major, most especially some "art in society" thing and especially especially an intro to philosophy. my philosophy professor started the course with alan watts' The Book on The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, whose central thesis, that the title is referring to, is that the belief in the self is toxic, a message the professor would weave into all future units too. experiences with art and experiments with psychedelics had already pushed me against cartesianism but that course, complimented with mushroom trips meditating on its lessons, really opened my eyes and also convinced me to request to change my major to philosophy, which i actually considered from the beginning but was scared off both because of the aforementioned curse of defining oneself and the afore-aforementioned lack of reading, and the fact that a philosophy degree doesn't have nearly as safe a career path as a CS one. i still feel a LOT of imposter syndrome calling myself a philosophy major though; i'm sure you know a lot more abt philosophy than me (*´ꇴ｀)ﾝ

the little part about falling in love in dreams was also so romantic (in both senses lol). i've fallen in love with people i've met in dreams before myself a few times, but i think the love that most stood out to me was a friendship rather than a romance. one time in elementary school i had a dream i lived with a guilmon (digimon tamers was one of my favorite things as a kid and in retrospect it is my favorite thing from my childhood) and he was my best friend; we'd do everything together and told each other everything, even when we had little fights sometimes i could feel that the fact that we were having these fights showed how much we truly cared for each other, and we would always make up in the end with the relationship returning even stronger than before. i never had any real close friends as a kid, in fact i wouldn't say i ever had a real close friend i could comfortably be emotionally honest with until earlier this year, and i was always concerned with how banal and distant my relationships in real life had been compared to paragons of friendship i'd see on tv, like digimon. i can still envision the ending of that dream, at (fictional) grandma's house, eating rice and seaweed and then having that final sip of tea and suddenly seeing myself as the tea, going down my digestive tract, and once i hit my own stomach i woke up, consumed by melancholy. i didn't really talk to anyone for the next two weeks. no one noticed.
i hope you can someday find that feeling of safety again. while i tragically lost it to external circumstances, i was finally able to feel that, in real life, earlier this year. and i hope to find it again.

um, that's the end of my overly verbose email lol,
nyx~

p.s. i think u would rly like the album A Boy by Morita Dōji

date: 11th of August, 2021
name: judgeschreber
subject: short response to nyx
message: i find myself agreeing with your concept of poetry as a text like any other (and how that concept extends to encompass the rest of art or life). a friend i now trust deeply was for a time someone who i interacted with not wholly but majorly through poems we wrote to each other. there would be chains of poems built off of other poems responding through themes, or making parody imitation. we could discuss our thoughts on each other's style of writing, our beliefs about poetry. sometimes an observer would join in and add their own poems to the pile. i think it was a very gratifying way to discuss beliefs and interests, describe experiences or drives or vent in a basic way. i accidentally learned things about language and developed an interest that stands.

ive always been uncomfortable with romance in dreams. i feel entangled placed in circumstances corresponding to drives that i feel unfamiliar with, yet are my own. i dont understand, though i try to, how love or passion crosses over into sensual pleasure or sex. i value dreams of friendship and appreciate your description of friendship with guilmon and have related to melody's poem in this way these ways.

ty for what youve shared in your response.

date: 19th of August, 2021
name: Frzzl
subject: Guestbook Greeting of Happiness and Joy
message: Hails/a! I found your site a bit ago, but didn't want to be the first to write in the guestbook haha. Anyway, your site is awesome, so thanks for making it, def inspiring me to try learning Gothic again \(￣︶￣*\))

date: 21st of December, 2021
name: Joshua Wiley
subject: Ailihpodielak
message: This is just something I wrote in a stream of consciousness (not sure if you’d call it a poem or what) while listening to Nick Drake about me getting over anhedonia I thought I’d send it cuz I dunno what else to say besides that you seem like a very cool and pleasant person from all the interaction I’ve had with you on discord, if you don’t think it belongs on your Letterbox Submission no need to post it obviously:

What it means when there is nothing to say
As you have forgotten words for pleasant mediocrity
You thought you drowned but the fish taught me how to breathe
Brittle flesh become dust in your hand
A displaced school that taught salvation
But there are still many more in the sea as they say
Love lets the loveless swim free
Flying through liquid for the same high
Alone but not precious friend you forgot
Dance little merman dance
For a connection's second chance
But shame keeps you off the beat
As you know that sea jigs have no feet
Adrift in motion yet the world turns away
Just as fast as you catch the corner
You have let the fatalism sink in
But the godly wind sculpts the waves
A road opens in the apathy of fate
Unceremonious fortune among the ruins
Washed ashore as blood becomes memory
Sleepwalking through a daydream
You wake up
The air is not an illusion
Yet you still fail to hold it
You still do not live in the present
But this present gifts itself living in you
You hold the pencil
As if the heart of a flower
The world blossomed around this point
But moments do not make a moment
As euphoria limbos under your pride
The bar in between is a sedentary island along the ocean
You understand life will change
I understand life has changed