Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.
Need is never a good basis for any relationship.
Who would you die for? Who would you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you?
There are times when you just have to let it all out. All the anger, all the pain.
I tried – I swear I tried. But you didn’t want to hear what I was saying, and I used that as an excuse to let it go on.
Is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in. It was more than that. I know it was more than that.
Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.
And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn’t want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.
Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word – forever – and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.
In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business – and I wanted to try to reflect that.
Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget.
Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.
It was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.
If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl.
She never liked me much, but she sure loved me.
She was nothing but good and I was nothing but bad, but then she died, and I didn’t.
Isaac out of surgery. It went well. He’s officially NEC. NEC meant “no evidence of cancer.” A second text came a few seconds later. I mean, he’s blind. So that’s unfortunate.
I always had this secret suspicion that I was special.
The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing.
I do my precalc homework, and then when I’m done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That’s the kind of weekend it is – the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.