tantonino select Send Message

Affection? Pooh! You speak like a green girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?

Boracay Breeze, a thin white tea entwined with chains of flowers, reminds me of Ophelia. Sweet Ophelia. My roommate has a succulent named Ophelia.

A forlorn lover to Hamlet, Ophelia grows mad and wilts. A flower, incapable of her own distress, Ophelia falls to her death into a stormy brook below. Ever-flowing time and the de-flowering of Ophelia departs from the falling, innocent willow.

Boracay Breeze is a tea for the heartbroken. It’s sweet, it’s inviting and captivating, but it’s lost. The over-powering perfume aroma (the tea was created as a request to be modeled after a subscriber’s perfume!) overshadows the tricky taste. The poetic taste entertains but leaves an emptiness that can’t be described. A lingering aftertaste warns you that you may have lost something that you’ll never be able to get back.

Scoffed at, ignored, suspected, disbelieved, commanded to distrust her own feelings, thoughts and desires, Ophelia is fragmented by contradictory messages … Seeming to absorb the general absence of belief in her own intelligence, virtue, and autonomy, Ophelia is left with an identity osmotically open to external suggestion; that is, she appears to lack clear psychic boundaries … Ophelia appears never to have [been] allowed to develop a discrete sense of self apart from those others (father and brother, then later, Hamlet) who fashioned her identity to suit their needs.
– Reading Ophelia’s Madness

Here’s a listening companion —
Sweet Ophelia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWpMFF5rxTo
Four Walls: https://soundcloud.com/broods/four-walls

There’s rue for you and here’s some for me. We may call it “herb of grace” O’ Sundays