Just to be clear I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I indend to leave this life so shattered there’s gonna have to be a thousand seperate heavens for all of my flying parts.
What I know about living is that the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window, when I can see what I couldn’t see before.
Why isn’t it okay to say there are things we have not survived?
Coming into our own humanity often takes enormous effort, commitment and bravery. I believe we should be taught that at an early age. I believe part of the violence of our culture stirs from the myth is kindness is natural. I think kindness would only be natural in a world where no one is hurt, and everyone is hurt. So kindness is work. Kindness is knees in the garden weeding our bites, our apathies, our cold shoulders, our silences, our cruelties, whatever taught us the world ‘ugly’.
Tell me we’ll be naming our children Beautiful and nothing else.
It’s okay. Everybody’s survival looks a little bit like death sometimes.
Let’s hyperventilate like it’s 1999.
If you told her the war is over do you think she’d sleep?
Something difficult to stomach in this life is the fact that we might all learn and grow at a pace that will hurt people.
Because anyone who has ever sat in lotus for more than a few seconds knows it takes a hell of a lot more muscle to stay then to go.
I explain my gender by saying I am happiest on the road when I’m not here or there, but in between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.
I know there are couples who never argue. But you and I, we are always going to fight for love.
When 28,000 buildings fall do you know how many walls are no longer there?
I wonder how many people have died driving while checking how many likes their Facebook status got. I wonder how much life has been lost in the bloody ditch of approval, how many skulls have swallowed windshields trying to see if they are worthy of applause, worthy of their own heart’s hungry beat.
My first psychotherapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
They want you thinking you’re bad at being a girl instead of good at being yourself. They want you to buy your blush from a store instead of letting it bloom from your butterflies. They’re telling you to blend in, like you’ve never seen how a blender works. Like they think you’ve never seen the mess from the blade.
Just me and my suitcase, hanging out wit the sun, learning how to pack light.
The trauma said, ‘Don’t write this poem. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.’ But my bones said, ‘Remember the boy who dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.’ My bones said, ‘Write the poem.
This life is built almost entirely of love and losing, isn’t it?
Whenever they ask why we stayed together for so long I say, “I don’t know. I just know that we cried at the exact same time in every movie. I know we blushed every day for the first two years. I know I always stole the covers and she never woke me up.