If she’s in pain now she doesn’t show it; she just closes her eyes and surrenders, and that is worse than her screaming for help, somehow.
To continue to love someone so far beyond help, beyond redemption, was madness.
I sprinted down the alley, not fast enough to avoid the cold water rolling down my back, with a childlike shriek. I caught his arm by the elbow, and we ran together, through the singing crowd, past swaying elders, men and women dancing too close, irritable off-planet visitors trying to cover up their wares in the market. We splashed through bright blue puddles, soaking our clothes. And we were both, for once, laughing.
It’s okay to not be okay, you know.
I was angry with him before. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I was just angry that the world had become such a complicated place, that I have never known even a fraction of the truth about it. Or that I allowed myself to grieve for someone who was never really gone, the same way I grieved for my mother all the years I thought she was dead. Tricking someone into grief is one of the cruelest tricks a person can play, and it’s been played on me twice.
My father has a way of persuading people without charm that has always confused me. He states his opinions as if they’re facts, and somehow his complete lack of doubt makes you believe him. That quality frightens me now, because I know what he told me: that I was broken, that I was worthless, that I was nothing. How many of those things did he make me believe?
Some people might leave you,′ he said, for once ignoring a joke in favor of something real. ‘But it doesn’t mean you’re worth leaving. It doesn’t mean that at all.
Death is not the only punishment you can give a person. You can also give them nightmares.
I fit my mouth to his and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder.
For God’s sake, Stiff,” he says. “You don’t have to follow me,” I say staring at the maze of bars above me. I shove my foot onto the place where two bars cross and push myself up, grabbing another bar in the process. I sway for a second, my heart beating so hard I can’t feel anything else. Every thought I have condenses into that heartbeat, moving at the same rhythm. “Yes, I do,” he says.
Sometimes she still said things that wounded me. And not because they were lies.
Most of the time death just comes whether you’ve said good-bye or not.
That was the problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness – you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you.
I know what it is to become something you hate. I know how it hurts. But life is full of hurt.
He must have stood there for a long time, making a list of all the terrible things he had done – almost killinng me was one of those thingss – and another list of all the good, heroic, brave things he had not done, and then decided that he was tired. Tired, not just of living, but of existing. Tired of being Al.
There’s poetry in it, in that poetry can be raw, and cruel, and strange, like this.
I might be in love with you. I’m waiting until I’m sure to tell you, though.
Life is full of pain’, I had told Akos, trying to draw him back from depression. ‘Your capacity for bearing it is greater than you believe.’ And I had been right.
Everything has changed and it won’t stop changing anytime soon.
I didn’t care about Suzao – in fact, I was planning to spit on his funeral pyre just to hear it sizzle – but.