I apologize for the double negative, but it’s a real double negative of a situation, a bind from which negating the negation is truly the only escape.
Life is not something you wield, you know?
You now is not you forever.” p. 93.
SAMHSA treatment referral helpline: 1-877- SAMHSA7. It can be a long and difficult road, but mental illness is treatable. There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.
Nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
I felt this weird mix of disappointment and anger welling up inside of me.
So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift. You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
When you date someone, you have the markers along the way, right: You kiss, you have The Talk, you say the Three Little Words, you sit on a swing set and break up. You can plot the points on a graph. And you check up with each other along the way: Can I do this? If I say this, will you say it back? But with friendship, there’s nothing like that. Being in a relationship, that’s something you choose. Being friends, that’s just something you are.
Depression isn’t a side effect of cancer. It’s a side effect of dying.
When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.
We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water.
The words used to describe it-despair, fear, anxiety, obsession-do so little to communicate it. Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain. Maybe we needed to give shape to the opaque, deep-down pain that evades both sense and senses.
For the first time in a long time, I drive with no music. I’m not happy-not happy about Jane and Mr. Randall Water Polo Doucheface IV, not happy about Tiny abandoning me without so much as a phone call, not happy about my insufficiently fake fake ID-but in the dark on Lake Shore with the car eating up all the sound, there’s something about the numbness in my lips after having kissed her that I want to keep and hold onto, something in it that seems pure, that seems like the singular truth.
How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?
I saw Gus’s mom pacing in the waiting room, talking.
How will you – you personally – ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?
It’s stupid, but I kept thinking I owed it to her – to Anne Frank, I mean – because she was dead and I wasn’t, because she had stayed quiet and kept the blind drawn and done everything right and still died...
May the pigs of fate fly you safely home.
There are something like a thousand times more microbes living in my particular biome than there are human beings on earth, and it often seems like I can feel them living and breeding and dying in and on me.