Draw every bad word you’ve ever called yourself on your body. Stand in the shower and pay attention to the way the words turn back into ink and disappear down the drain.
Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.
The problem with the chemicals in my head is they lead to feelings in the rest of me.
And he loves her. He loves her like he can never grab enough of her between his fingers.
There is no prose as inspiring as a single human being with the courage to live well.
Sometimes I have a weird dream that we’re all relatively brief sparks of consciousness that live on a rock circling a ball of fire.
I need you to understand something. I wrote this for you. I wrote this for you and only you. Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it. They may think they get it, but they don’t. This is the sign you’ve been looking for. You were meant to read these words.
There was a research article I read with the headline, “Love Is A Single Act Committed By Two Brains,” because of the way oxytocin levels rose in a mother and a son when they hugged. I wish more poets became scientists.
She was real to me. And while I can be logical about this, logic has never once mended a broken heart or fixed a sundered soul. She has poisoned the very core of me. A dream has killed me.
Yet you still value the things you’ve lost the most. Because the things you’ve lost are still perfect in your head. They never rusted. They never broke. They are made of the memories you once had, which only grew rosier and brighter, day by day. They are made of the dreams of how wonderful things could have been and must never suffer the indignity of actually still existing. Of being real. Of having flaws. Of breaking and deteriorating. Only the things you no longer have will always be perfect.
Now if only I could do something about my neurosis that forces me to narrate my life out loud for everyone to hear,” I said, to no one in particular.
Everyone just kind of leans their expectations of who you are on you and it makes you petrified of who you really might be.
Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would’ve changed lives.
It doesn’t hurt because if you keep hurting the same part of you again and again and again, the nerve endings all die. And when that happens, that part of you goes numb. That’s why it doesn’t hurt. Don’t be proud of it.
I hope that if love hurts, it teaches you something about yourself or about someone else.
You are well within your rights to stand up, interrupt everyone around you and say, ‘This is not who I am. This is not what I want. I’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.
I hope you never hate anything longer than you need to.
Kindness is not a currency, and if you treat it like one, then that is not kindness.
You are here for one moment and it last’s exactly one lifetime.
If you are lucky, one day you’ll get the chance to have your life defined by how much you loved and were loved by someone else.