"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
"It seemed like a great sign that we should meet again so soon. And whether or not it actually was a sign, the crucial thing is that we were both willing to see it as such."
But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you
I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it."
"Maybe she’d always been there. Maybe strangers enter your heart first and then you spent the rest of your life searching for them."
"It’s said it takes seven years to grow completely new skin cells. To think, this year I will grow into a body you never will have touched."
"There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say"
"I love like a leaky faucet or I love like a dam breaking. There is nothing in between."
"We don’t have to be defined by the things we did or didn’t do in our past. Some people allow themselves to be controlled by regret. Maybe it’s a regret, maybe it’s not. It’s merely something that happened."
"Oh, no. No, no. Not wrong. I’ve never known you to be wrong, Bessie. Your facts are always either untrue or exaggerated, but you’re never wrong - no, no."
I will let go of the past and accept the things that I cannot change. I will forgive, love, and embrace the unknown.
In 21 days I will be 21.
In 21 days, I won’t miss you anymore.
"Everyone else isn’t you. It turns out that’s a huge problem for me."
I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away. I can’t say goodbye."
"Here is the riddle of love: Everything it gives to you, it takes away."
"We don’t say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can’t say everything, so you don’t say nothing."
I’ve been taught by my mother that love is another type of cancer. The kind that kills you slowly, by infecting your organs one by one until it turns your body against itself.
And maybe there is some truth in that. I grew up watching parts of my mother disappear with each and every lover, shrinking into herself like a new sweater tumbling in the wash. That’s why I let my spine stiffen, my tongue sharpen. I built myself a suit of armor made up of excuses and wore it every day.
Please don’t come any closer. I’m fragile underneath. It’s better for both of us if you leave.
But then came you. And piece by piece, I shed my armor.
I know you can hurt me, but I trust you not to. I don’t want you to go. Please stay.
My mother would be surprised to see you and I together because instead of fading away, I become more of what I am meant to be.
I still hesitate when I say I love you because the words feel foreign in my mouth. Sometimes I don’t call back because I forget that I have someone waiting for me at home. But I am learning.
So maybe love is neither the sickness nor the cure. Maybe love is simply the catalyst.
"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear."
— Stephen King, Different Seasons
"It’s time to train yourself
to sleep alone again
and it’s so fucking hard."
to sleep alone again
and it’s so fucking hard."
When you finally let go, it is like opening your front door and seeing yourself standing there again.
Welcome home, it’s been so long.
There were always warning signs but you were blinded by hope and and thoughts like, 'Maybe this time it'll be different'. You chose to stay inside a burning building until the smoke became too thick to clear and the foundation began to crack. But now it was time to get yourself out.
No one tells you, though, that trying to move on is a kind of death that you inflict upon yourself. People always make it sound so easy, as if by emptying the stuff in your house, you can empty yourself of the love you still feel.
The memories you have like to coddle you. Laughter and late nights drunk on the feeling of being young and infatuated. They deposited in you the way sand deposits onto wet summer skin. They stick on you in the most unconventional places, underneath fingernails and knobby knees. But you let them stay because it reminds you of how you were once in the water and the sun was beating on your neck.
You now know that was how you ruin yourself.
Before the word us turned into something singular, everything had already changed. You look back, really look back, and you see that he is not the same. And neither are you. So you release the fists clenching onto the past and you take off your rose-colored glasses.
You used to mistake the silhouette on the wall for yourself. Used to think of yourself as a stray cat scratching on his door, waiting to be let in again. Not anymore.
It takes time for you to realize that your life with him is not juxtaposed. It’s not as simple as a before and after. He is just a detour on your journey. The destination is still there, waiting for you.
When you finally let go, it is like opening your front door and seeing yourself standing there again.
Welcome home, it’s been so long.
"The devil doesn’t come dressed in a red cape and pointy horns. He comes as everything you’ve ever wished for.
"Just because one person’s problem is less traumatic than another’s doesn’t mean they’re required to hurt less."
"You cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it."
— Audre Lorde
"When I see you,
I pretend that nothing
ever happened.
But the truth is
it did,
does,
and always will mean
everything
to me."
I pretend that nothing
ever happened.
But the truth is
it did,
does,
and always will mean
everything
to me."
But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human."
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
"You are the best parts of all the songs I love."
"Just because things hadn’t gone the way I had planned didn’t necessarily mean they had gone wrong."
— Ann Patchett, What Now?
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN JUST FASCINATED BY SOMEBODY BECAUSE YOU CAN’T FIGURE THEM OUT? YOU WANT TO HEAR THEIR SECRETS, KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON INSIDE THEIR HEAD, WHAT MAKES THEM TICK BECAUSE IT’S SO OBVIOUSLY CONTRADICTORY TO THEIR ACTIONS ON THE OUTSIDE.
