the weekly reverie #5.25
the month of love, dancing and a drawer for all my jewellery
Howdy!!! Welcome to a weekly roundup of everything that happened as well as what we’ve read, enjoyed and written these past days :)
Introducing The Cry Lounge: a weekly publication born in
's teenage bedroom, soon moving into her twenty-something Paris room - a publishing studio always on the hunt for the next piece to make readers cry and scream their lungs out. Have any letters of unrequited love or angsty poetry about your parents? - between our pages, they'll feel right at home <3
not sure what a weekly r.e.p.o.r.t. is? find my modified answer below:
R - Reading: What books, articles, or content they’ve consumed
E - Enjoying: What they’ve enjoyed
P - Publishing: Everything that they pressed publish on this week
O - Obsessing: What they’re currently obsessed with or passionate about
R - Recommending: What they recommend to others
T - Treating: What they’ve treated themselves to or indulged in
“so there i was about thirteen months later, in the exact same spot. we couldn’t get inside as it was closed on that day, but the wave still crushed over me as i glanced into the windows. hope to see myself a year ago? i think that was the first time in months i felt hope. right there. and i was hoping for something impossible. i wasn’t sitting in that cafe anymore, and i wasn’t who i used to be.” - Bonnie Orbison
from the latest of Orbison’s online diary - subscribe here to read more
📖: r for reading
Been continuing to read Substacks first thing in the morning! More or less this month, like any good habit/routine the second week is less exciting and you tend to forget or rebel against it. I can tell you I had the worst anxiety on the days I immediately opened up social media or started replying to the messages that have accumulated overnight. I’ve read a few good ones though - they are shared over at
. A mix of literary fiction, poetry, being an artist and love, as usual.We have moved into the month of love now, haven’t we? You see ads for perfumes and condoms everywhere. It’s also already a year ago I have posted my submission callout for my first issue01:LOVE. It was an act of rebel as well, I didn’t want to spend Valentine’s Day crying over past crushes and unreceived phone calls. I ended up reading people’s feelings and thoughts on love for the entire day. It was a blast. Not sure what I’ll be doing this coming Valentine’s Day. Weirdly, when I started my now ex-boyfriend I told him how I don’t really see the sense in celebrating love only on one day of the year. The fakeness of it. Simply tell someone you love them whenever you feel it. He insisted we try and do something on that day together. My anxiety immediately smelled the danger, and guess what? It was correct.
Well, we aren’t here to discuss my past relationship or what my plans are for V-Day - maybe you want to let me know what you’re going to do! that’d be very pleasant actually.
Books-wise I’m deep into my current e-read All the Perfect Days by Michael Thompson. Every free minute, I open it to continue. Physical books I have started my annual re-read of Conversation with Friends by Sally Rooney. And I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to re-read it every single year. There’s no sense of boredom or annoyance cause you know all the words on the next page. I do know the words, Rooney in her debut achieves though a freshness between the lines that I admire and that leads me to re-read this one yearly.
🍓: e for enjoying
Absorbed myself into actually sitting down and dedicating the next two hours on a film. That’s how I re-watched Dirty Dancing for the first time in four years. Last time I watched it, I was sixteen, awaiting my 17th birthday, and it had that blandness of boredom to it. I knew all the words, all the dance routines, the lightning of it simply was lost. I swore that I would only rewatch it when I’d be sure to not be bored again. So there I was beginning of this past week. And I absolutely loved it! I missed Johnny and Frances - I also discovered why this film aged well. There’s so much respect and admiration in Johnny’s posture to Frances, everyone else calls her Baby and even kid - Neil, you didn’t age well. There isn’t the usual cringeness of 1980s films present.
📝 : p for publishing
Here’s a recap of everything we pressed publish on this week:
I put out my first journal entry since the Summer on
- a vulnerable comeback that made me realise I’m no longer afraid to simply press publish. Yes, I do think about people I wrote on reading it and knowing it’s about them. But I’m not afraid. There’s nothing wrong with writing down my own feelings and calling it a Substack essay. This is what happens if you’re connected with me. I’m a writer and I will write about you.My comeback to my online diary
after four months of traveling & writing over 50K words, collectively for my novels, Substack and diary - there had to come something to fruition for publishing - the snippet I shared above is for a long entry coming out this coming Friday called “haunting you with my writing and being haunted by drowning nostalgia”.
I wrote (and published) some single reviews for my music magazine
this week.In this one, I even published my photograph debut. I started taking up photography about a year now and so far I’ve been known as the one that never comes around to edit and share the photos with the ones I took them of or even public. Well, I finally did. Swipe through above or below. Substack’s quality is better than Instagram’s, of course.
My 2024 poetry advent calendar is being printed for the very first time - it’s a really limited quanitity of copies, so if you’re interested in getting one, there are available for pre-order now :)
🎵: o for obsessing
I was very focused on moving my body this week. Wouldn’t necessarily say I’ve been obsessing over moving my body, moreover for dancing. Really embraced just shaking out my legs and arms to good music, especially during breaks or after I got work done for the day. I still try to get away from my computer for the breaks I have made myself. Why stare at a screen during my break when that’s all I do for work?
Obsessing over dancing to songs you normally wouldn’t dance. People say you can’t dance to Joan Baez. Well, you haven’t let yourself feel the music. Oh, maybe rewatching Dirty Dancing really showed this me again. That was all I said as a kid when I first discovered dancing in my bedroom.
🔖: r for recommending
Getting yourself some organisers for your desk! I bought a small desk organiser that has little drawers, some big space for notebooks and hard-drives. Whatever was just laying around my desk cause I simply needed it daily for work now has their own space and place. I’m astonished how my desk is simply empty now. Nothing laying around, in danger of falling off the desk. My brain immediately tells me to look for the things I know I need and then after a few seconds of furiously looking around the room, I realise everything is right there, on my desk. Just organised.
😌: t for treating
Do what you wanna do! Corporate play into your mundane tasks! As a child, I used to make all my decisions with a dice. I rolled a number and then counted the shirts I had, the number I rolled, that was the shirt I wore that day. Simple as that, I have brought back the dice. If there’s a decision (obviously not a life or death one), I roll the dice. Not sure with what task to start the day and everything doesn’t have to be done that day, let’s roll the dice. The 20 minutes I usually would spend on making that choice is gone. It’s spent actually doing something. Every morning, I ask myself what it is that I wanna do that day. On Wednesday, I woke up and answered with changing my bed sheets. It was only recently I had changed them, but my Mama asked if I could change hers while she’s at work, so while I did that, I was in the mood to change my own. There’s a special feeling to going to bed with a freshly made bed.
Thanks for being here & welcoming me to write you. Tell me in the comments what you’ve been enjoying, reading or obsessing about.
Yours, Bonnie Orbison
“haunting you with my writing & being haunted by drowning nostalgia” just came out - read a snippet below:
