Kenji is a walking paradox of Unflinchingly Serious Person and 12-Year-Old Boy Going Through Puberty all rolled into one.
The words get easier the moment you stop fearing them.
I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters.
You deserve to live. You deserve to be alive.
I want to smash this concrete world into oblivion. I want to be bigger, better, stronger. I want to be the bird that flies away.
Only an idiot would rely on the energy of a bean or a leaf to stay awake throughout the day.
I tuck caution into my pocket and hope I can reach for it if I need to.
His lips soften into a smile that cracks apart my spine. He repeats my name like the word amuses him. Entertains him. Delights him. In seventeen years no one has said my name like that.
In a world where there is so much to grieve and so little good to take? I grieve nothing. I take everything.
You are moody. It’s always ‘Shut up, Kenji.’ ‘Go to sleep, Kenji.’ ‘No one wants to see you naked, Kenji.’ When I know for a fact that there are thousands of people who would love to see me naked –.
I love you exactly as you are.
And some days I wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.
Why sleep when there are books to read.
Hope can make people do terrible things.
I want your mind. Your strength. I want to be worth your time.
It’s hot rain and humid days and broken thermostats. It’s screaming and raging steam engines and wanting to take your clothes off just to feel a breeze. It’s the kind of kiss that makes you realize oxygen is overrated.
We are synonyms but not the same.
People can think whatever they like. I don’t desire their validation.
Hope will break your heart all over again.
Insane for your sweet, sweet love!
And we are quotation marks, inverted and upside down, clinging to one another at the end of this life sentence. Trapped by lives we did not choose.