"I hope that one day you realize what you had with me and you scream your lungs dry."

"So, fuck anyone who has ever told you you’re not good enough because you are. You are fucking gold and they are rusted copper.

The best revenge is to better yourself. At the end of the day, the thing the ones that hurt you would hate most, is to see you succeed.”

You caused me so much pain, and I want to hate you so badly, but I can’t forget about all the times you made me feel as though I was made of sunshine.

If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad.

And at times, reality is far better than being in a dream world.

I am never coming back. The problem is that you never give me anything, or to put it more precisely, you have nothing inside you that you can give me. You are good and kind and handsome, but living with you is like living with a chunk of air. It’s not entirely your fault, though. There are lots of women who will fall in love with you. But please don’t call me. Just get rid of all the stuff I’m leaving behind.  —HARUKI MURAKAMI

I wonder if the people that love you
Can see that you still pick at your teeth with my bones,
Or that your saliva is still red
From the open wound on my flesh.
I wonder if they still see pieces of me caked under your fingernails.
You smiled so wide you swallowed me whole,
Canines digging into my thighs as I felt myself go limp in the clenched fist you held me in.
I’ve spent my whole life still drowning in the pits of your stomach,
Trying to claw my way out of the cage you locked me in
So you could pretend it never happened.
It did.
I hope you never love someone again.
I hope you never bare your fangs
In a scare attempt to make that poor girl stay,
I hope you never hunt again.
I will stay here, 
Trapped in the emptiness of your belly,
My clenched fists beating against your core,
A constant reminder of your appetite,
Of your animosity,
Of your loss of control,
I will stay.
There’s no more room here. 

So I’ve thought a lot about something you said. About how, when you realize how quickly everything can fall apart, makes you never want to give up anything good, ever again. Whatever this is between us, it is good. It is so good. It is actually the best thing that has ever happened to me and I don’t want it to be over. —WHAT IF, 2014

No matter how bad our relationship got, I wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart for it. Because I needed it, I needed you in this life.

Her bedroom had become a sort of museum of her childhood: too much of her past there and not enough of her present. She began to sift through her belongings, boxing the old ones away. One by one she said good-bye to them. For a few days, looking at the sparseness of her bedroom, she felt more capable than she had ever felt in her life, stronger and closer to the center of her own experience. She gloried in the feeling, though she knew it would not last

There was always something very close and delicate between us, you and me. It was there from the very beginning. But now that has been lost forever. That perfect meshing of the gears, that mythical something, has been destroyed. Because I destroyed it. I am terribly sorry it ever happened.
I have only one thing to ask of you, and that is this: please don’t concern yourself about me anymore. Please don’t try to find me. As far as the clothing and other things I have left behind are concerned, I’m sorry, but please just dispose of them or donate them somewhere. Everything belongs in the past now. Anything I ever used in my life with you I have no right to use now.
Goodbye.

I’ll miss you. I’ll never see you again, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop missing you. The way things are, we didn’t stand a chance. In some other universe, but not in this one

I’m glad we dated. I needed to date someone like you. Before you I only dated guys who looked good on paper. You were really, really smart. But also…Selfish. Crass. Not always in an entertaining way, mind you. You hated your job, your life, you were completely comfortable being miserable. You were horrible on paper. And I loved you. Being with you made me realize that it doesn’t have to look good on paper to feel good.

Perhaps one day we will meet again as different characters in a different story. Perhaps we shall share a lifetime then

When I watched you dancing that day, I saw something else. I saw a new world coming rapidly. And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go. That is what I saw. It wasn’t really you, what you were doing, I know that. But I saw you and it broke my heart. And I’ve never forgotten.  —KAZUO ISHIGURO

All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky.  —KAZUO ISHIGURO

It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the cafe, your figure, your dress, that I still see.

I’m sitting here thinking of all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other. Everything I put on you. Everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I’ll always love you because we grew up together. You helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know, there will be a piece of you in me always. And I’m grateful for that. Whatever someone you become and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end.

Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I’ll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard.

She could forget in the loveliest and most complete way of anyone I ever knew. She could carry a fight overnight but at the end of week she could forget it completely and truly. She had a built-in selective memory and it was not built entirely in her favor. She forgave herself in her memory and she forgave you too. She was a very strange girl and I loved her very much.

“You can’t accept the fact that life doesn’t come with the closure and symmetry of a movie. You hate the loose ends, the knowledge that there are things in life that get screwed up and will remain irrevocably screwed up.”

“I don’t want her back.”

“I know you don’t. I’m not worried about that. But you don’t want her to resent you or hate you either. And you can’t accept the fact that you left something behind, something messy. You want to keep going back to see if you can somehow clean it up, make it more tidy in your mind, but it isn’t going to happen.

And while you’re busy looking back, you’re not looking at what you have right in front of you. Maybe that’s why you write, so that you can give closure to everything, you know? Achieve resolution.”

“I know what I have here. You know I’ve always been in love with you.”

“I do, but it’s not enough. I love you, but I’m looking forward, not back. You screwed up in the past. Well, shit happens. You learn what you can, you scrape it off your shoe and move on. If you can’t do that, you’ll never get a chance to get it right.”

don't be scared
who cares if we lose again.

If things were easy to find,
they wouldn't be worth finding.

The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone

I didn’t mean it. I was just angry at something. I didn’t mean I didn’t love you.

‘But give it 10 years and I’ll just be another woman that you got tired of fucking.’
'You know, in 10 years’ time you might very well be the love of my life.’  

What do any of us really know about love? It seems to me we’re just beginners at love. We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person’s being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife too. But I did, I know I did. There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love?  

i forgive you, waiting for him to call, i forgive you, the diets and the cruel friends. especially for that one time you said ‘i fucking give up on love, it’s not worth it, i’d rather be alone forever’. you were just pretending, weren’t you? i know you didn’t mean that. your body, your mouth, your heart, made specifically for loving. sometimes the things we love, will kill us, but weren’t we dying anyway? i forgive you for being something that will eventually die. perishable goods, fading out slowly, little human, i wouldn’t want to be in a world where you don’t exist.  —WARSAN SHIRE, “AND WERE YOU BEING GOOD TO YOURSELF?” 

But it’s December now, and the sky is bright, and it’s clear to me. I’m telling you why we broke up. I’m writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much

I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especially me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. You can’t just sit there and put everybody’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things. I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m going to be who I really am. And I’m going to figure out what that is.

And maybe, just maybe, if she’s as smart and as brave as I’m expecting she’ll be, she’ll take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it. That is what, on my best days, I hope. What I dream

1. Don’t rush things. Take the time to really get to know each other.
2. Focus on positivity rather than negativity. Getting angry quickly or being harsh and critical will undermine and ruin even strong relationships. In contrast, being kind and gentle will help develop love.
3. Appreciate the little things the other person does. Don’t overlook their efforts; don’t just expect their help.
4. Enjoy the ways you’re different – and not clones of one another. It makes things interesting (and creates healthy space).
5. Don’t get into a rut so that you’re bored when you’re together. Keeping doing something different, or keep trying something new.
6. Learn how to be listener, someone who’s understanding, and helps their partner open up and share what’s bothering them.           
7. Be loyal and committed, so trust can be established - that helps you both feel safe, and it will grow a strong, deep love.

Stop the idea that a woman’s beauty is for a man’s gaze, that you have the right to touch her. This idea that she must smile and accept unwanted approaches even when she is clearly uncomfortable. Just because you call a woman “beautiful” does not mean you have the right to behave like her beauty belongs to you. There are women healing from scars gotten from men who have called them beautiful yet offered them darkness. The beauty of a woman is hers and hers alone. There are triggers for some women, respect this and know this. The beauty of a woman is hers and hers alone.

Someone told me I’m glowing and that I look like I’m in love and on the outside I said thank you but on the inside I was like its highlighter ho

It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for.

Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have.

You’re very naive and fragile because you act as if you don’t believe in anything, as if you don’t care to believe in anything, but, really, all you want is to believe in something with all of your heart

Do you sometimes wish you didn’t have to go home? You could close your eyes and you wouldn’t have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you’re strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.

just work towards living a meaningful life and be good to those who are good to you, and nobody will be able to tell you different 

she was his arms and legs and
maybe for a while

his heart

There is so much history in the way he looks at her. In the way he says her name. When they are together, there is a current that runs between them; like an electric charge on the verge of erupting into a perfect storm.
I don’t love her anymore, he says.

And it is in the way he says the word, her - that tells me otherwise.

I want very badly to be in love again, which is why I’m in no position to look for it. But I hope I’ll know it when it comes. —JONATHAN TROPPER

And then we’re broken and what good did that do? All I can think is that you are all that I have and that I love more than all that is and have given up everything for and betrayed everything for and killed off everything for are being destroyed and your nerves and your spirit broken all time, day and night and that I can’t do anything about it because you won’t let me.

“we almost made it. I think we almost loved each other”

I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I know that…that love is supposed to be transformative…and that’s how I’m trying to look at it. There. Bang. I’ve been transformed, and however it happened it doesn’t matter. You can go or stay, and it will still have happened. So I’ve been trying to look at you as a metaphor or something. But it doesn’t work. The terribly inconvenient fact is that, without you around, everything slides back to how it was before. It can’t do otherwise. And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is…Well it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it

“I do what I can, though the magic is surely gone.”

And I said to myself that she was the first thing that I had ever missed in my life.

It’s just that, you try so hard to get it right, you know? To get your life to this point you’ve imagined in your head and you tell yourself that if I can just get to there, I’ll be happy

“And yet here she is, lying beside the man who has failed her in every possible way, who has used up the best years of her life, feeling tenderness and loss. It makes no sense, but if there is one kernel of wisdom she does possess on matters of love it is that sense rarely enters into it. Silver was the first man she ever loved, and even now, after all the anger and hatred, she still feels things shifting inside of her when he walks into a room. And that’s not healthy, or fair, or right, but there it is. We don’t stop loving people just because we hate them, but we don’t stop hating them either.”