How does your life move forward, when all you want to do is hold still.
My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.
This is what I want so don’t be sad.
I was so blinded by her talent that I didn’t recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.
That’s what friends do: they notice things. They’re there for each other. They see what parents don’t.
I was such a quiet kid, so shy and calm and in my own head. Of course I knew about being sad. Maybe that’s the reason I saved all the things I thought were pretty.
I sleep through the next day. Each time I go to the bathroom, I try not to look in the mirror. Once, I catch my reflection: it looks like I’ve been punched in both eyes. I can’t talk about the day that follows that.
Crushes are supposed to be fun, aren’t they? They definitely aren’t supposed to be so torturous.
Maybe there is no right thing to say. Maybe the right thing is just a myth, not really out there at all.
We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.
It isn’t the happy ending Ingrid and I had dreamed up, but it’s all a part of what I’m working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and hold you close.
I imagine what would happen if everyone turned their regrets into wishes, went around shouting them.
Her suicide shook me deeply. It changed so much about how I view myself, the work I do with all of you.
No,” I say. “I didn’t know that,” and as I say it I feel flooded with bitterness at all the things Ingrid kept secret from me.
YOu just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment of your life, and think, “Soon this will be over”.
I’ve been waiting for this for so long – something new, life after high school.
What’s the use in waiting until the right moment if that moment never comes?” I say. “What if the moment escapes you in a split second when your focus was elsewhere?
There’s something about distance, being removed from what’s familiar, that lets things happen.
I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders... I fall in love too easily... I have fierce spells of self-doubt.
I think that sometimes people want something so much that they manifest it. Or at least they try to.