I want to go somewhere good when I read, not into someone else’s crappy life.” “Good lives aren’t worth reading about,” he argues. “I read about the struggle. Other people’s growing pains.” “I like happy endings,” I say. “Real life never has a happy ending.” “God, you’re depressing. I don’t know why we’re friends.
There is intimacy in quiet, in being with another person and not needing to say anything.
It’s okay to talk to yourself here; I saw someone else doing it.
The truth is often angry.
He made my truth light and funny without diminishing the importance of it.
The moon is wicked, jealous of the sun. People do bad things in the dark, under the hollow gaze of the moon. It’s smiling at me now, proud of my sin. I’m not proud. I’m not anything. An eye for an eye, I tell myself. A beating for a beating.
Love was sacrificing your selfish nature for someone you were more committed to than yourself.
There are cities that take your breath away by their sheer size; some by the beat of their rhythmic culture, but Seattle gives you your breath back. Fills your lungs. I take it in and feel like I can breathe for the first time in my life. My God, it’s like I’ve been looking for this place all along. My.
She was my opposite, but I wanted to be like her. I wanted to fall in love underneath a tree, fast and hard. I wanted someone to forget me and then remember me in their soul, like her Caleb did.
Hos before bros!” I yell at the phone. But it’s too late. A bro came, and both the hos are in turmoil.
I’ve grown attached to my broken heart. I think I’ll keep it.
I marvel at how yearning can make you disintegrate.
Contrast is important in life. We understand what light is because we can compare it with what we know is dark. Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter. It’s the very same with sadness. And it’s important to experience sadness, to embrace it in order to truly know happiness. I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
Sweet is made sweeter after we eat something bitter.
I’m not a follower, but I’m not brave enough to be the leader either. I don’t see this as a flaw; it’s a strength, really. Leaders get burned for having strong opinions. I get to have them without the pretentious bravado.
It feels better to speak in metaphor, easier. It’s saying the truth without actually saying the truth. You could only speak to an artist this way. No one else would get it. “Do.
I was just a flat line until he came along. And maybe now I’m hurting. But isn’t that what love is supposed to do? Make you feel, make you brave, make you look at yourself more carefully?
But perhaps art isn’t supposed to make you feel good, but just to make you feel. Does it cure the numb? I don’t know.
Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “I’m not broken because I don’t want the same thing as everyone else. And, no, you’re not invited to fix me, or soften my heart, or make me want things I never knew I wanted.
We are all sheep, who get jobs, and have babies, and diet, and try to carve something special out for ourselves using the broken hearts, and bored minds, and scathed souls life delivered to us.