It is a horrible wonderful thing to be in love with you. To get to hear you sing for hour after hour but never be the subject of the song. To listen and listen and listen.
Too much. Too fast. Too intense. The glass soul falls to the ground and shatters into a thousand words. The invisible boy becomes visible, and all of a sudden, his emotions blast neon.
We always underestimated our own participation in magic. That is, we thought of magic as something that existed with or without us. But that’s not true. Things are not magical because they’ve been conjured for us by some outside force. They are magical because we create them, and then deem them so.
There’s a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens.
You hear the phrase all the time: a brush with death. What they don’t tell you is that the brush has paint on it. And once it touches you, you can’t get it off.
I push her hair over her ear. Look her in the eye. Feel so much love for her then that it feels like the love I have for life itself.
I don’t understand how it’s possible to know you have a good life, but still be missing out on it. I don’t understand why I won’t let myself give in to what I have. It’s good. What I have is good.
So much happiness can only make me sad.
But have them tell us that every person needs to be with another person in order to be happy, and we nod along like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But there’s no reason for it, is there? It’s not a proven truth. It’s just some thing that our culture has come to spin itself around, mostly so we’ll procreate, and we’re the dupes who fall for it over and over and over again.
In this space, in this moment, we are who we want to be. I am lucky, because for me that doesn’t take much courage. But for others, it takes a world of bravery to make it to the clearing.
I am amazed at the randomness, the comedy, and the faith that brings us all together and makes us hold on.
We tried to tell them what was happening. We tried to tell them the disease was spreading. We needed doctors. We needed scientists. Most of all, we needed money, and to get money, we needed attention. We put our lives in other people’s hands, and for the most part, they looked at us blankly and said, What lives? What hands?
You will miss the taste of Froot Loops. You will miss the sound of traffic. You will miss your back against his. You will even miss him stealing the sheets. Do not ignore these things.
Conversation is not his strong suit. In fact, I’m not sure it’s a suit he owns.
There’s no way to know if we would have lasted. There’s no way to be sure, and plenty of reasons to doubt it. I just wish I’d had the chance. That is one of the things I miss the most – the chance to make it work.
Reading is not life. Reading is creating life in your head.
It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things.
I want to have faith in strangers. I want to have faith in what we’re all going to do next. But I’m worried. I see things shifting from United We Stand to God Bless America. I don’t believe in God Bless America. I don’t believe a higher power is standing beside us and guiding us. I don’t believe we’re being singled out. I believe much more in United We Stand. I have my doubts, but I want it to be true.
I was seventeen, halfway toward eighteen, and I had learned something nobody had ever taught me: Once you get to a certain age, especially if a driver’s license is involved, you can go a whole day – a whole week, even – without ever seeing your family. You can maybe say good morning and maybe say good night, but everything in the middle can be left blank.
It’s not easy,” she says, in that voice that mothers have, that mix of unwanted knowledge and small consolation. “Whatever you had – I don’t know exactly what it was, and that’s fine. But it must not be easy for you. You miss him, and that’s okay. But you have to figure that if it’s too hard to hang on, then maybe you should let go.