Hope is what makes you look outside the window to see if it’s stopped raining. Hope is what makes you believe he’ll text you back. Hope is why you buy your jeans a little tight... Hope is why you get out of bed in the morning, and why you dream at night. Hope is what makes us believe that things can only get better. Hope is what keeps us going.
When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted.
Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together.
Prejudice goes both ways, you know. There are people who suffer from it, and there are people who profit from it.
Could it be as simple as that? Could love be not grand gestures or empty vows, not promises meant to be broken, but instead a paper trail of forgiveness? A line of crumbs made of memories, to lead you back to the person who was waiting?
You can have the best intentions, but the moment there’s a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces.
Stories are all around us, caught in the throats of the strangers you walk past and scrawled on the pages of locked diaries. They’re in love letters that were never sent and between the lines of every conversation ever spoken. Just because your story’s not written down doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Wheather it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half – before and after – with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.
Engaging with haters is like rearranging pictures on the Titanic. What’s the point?
It’s the difference between dancing along the eggshell crust of acquaintance and diving into the messy center of a relationship. It’s not always perfect; it’s not always pleasant – but because it is rooted in respect, it is unshakable.
The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it... some stories just don’t have a happy ending.
The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They’re pale, like a lioness’s, nearly golden, but they also look like they’ve done their fair share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any.
What would you do if you only had one day left in this world? Spend it with the people you love? Travel to the far corners of the earth to see as many wonders as possible? Eat nothing but chocolate? Would you apologize for all your mistakes? Would you stand up to those you’d never had the courage to face? Would you tell your secret crush that you loved him or her? Why is it that we wait till the last minute to do the things we should be doing all along?
I don’t get to rewrite my story; I just have to stumble to the end of it.
Admitting that racism has played a part in our success means admitting that the American dream isn’t quite so accessible to all.
There are all sorts of losses people suffer – from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion.
Coal, with time and heat and pressure, will always become a diamond. But if you were freezing to death, which would you consider the gem?
Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that’s heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it’s all going in the other direction.
What one person takes away from a book might be very different from what the next person takes away – almost as if the story is altered depending on who’s reading, where, and when. But then, maybe all books are like that – a little different each time they are opened. The real question is who’s doing the changing: the story, or the reader.
Babies are such blank slates. They don’t come into this world with the assumptions their parents have made, or the promises their church will give, or the ability to sort people into groups they like and don’t like. They don’t come into this world with anything, really, except a need for comfort. And they will take it from anyone, without judging the giver. I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.