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to everyone in the world who needs to feel a little less alone
It is for all who know loneliness and for all who search for themselves.
Being sick teaches you that reasons are just poor attempts at justifying misfortune. They give you an illusion of why, but why is a loud question, and death is quiet.
We spent our whole lives together pretending, but if you pretend for too long, reality reminds you one way or another that it doesn’t like being insulted.
“Remember me,” he says. “Remember that just because the stars fell doesn’t mean they weren’t worth wishing on.”
That’s all a hospital is, really. Not a place to get better or a place to be treated, but a place to wait.
That’s what waiting to die is like. A bomb drifts through your veins by the name of illness. You cannot defuse it. You cannot destroy it. You cannot run from it.
Time, disease, and death are the greatest thieves in the world.
“Love is hard to walk away from, even if it hurts.”
“Our ending doesn’t belong to us.”
When you’ve lived in the same place as long as I have, you find that people don’t know what to say to someone they think is dying. People feel awkward around the sick, so they pretend the sickness is invisible. They avoid the elephant in the room so blatantly that you can tell it’s all they’re thinking about. They create distance without even meaning to because distance is comfortable.
Destruction is addictive, he writes. The more I am, the less I want to be. The less I am, the lesser I want to become.
If there’s one nice thing about books and movies, it’s that they can make you forget for a while. Forgetting is an essential part of grief.
I can’t do much for him, but I can be another body, another soul, so that he knows he isn’t alone.
vanity. They’re about control. And he wants to take whatever his son has left of it. When the door shuts behind me, I can’t bear to leave. I barnacle myself to
Love gives people the power to be treacherous. Being hurt by someone you share such a thing with is draining—a needle under the skin or a knife in the rib. Hate is a choice. Love is not.
“But sometimes parents love the idea of their child more than the person they are.”
fear is just a large shadow with a little spine.”
To all who stole from us, we defy you. You tempt the world and lay waste to it, but try and lay waste to us. Our minds are stronger than our bodies, and our bodies are not yours to call weak. We will kill you in every way we know. That way, when we must go, the playing field is even. Time will end. Disease will fester. Death will die.
When you meet someone infatuating, someone you can stare at and listen to and talk to without taking notice of time, someone you think of constantly, there comes the question of blooming addiction. Nothing addictive is ever good for you.
“Illness is temporary,” he explains. “Injuries borrow our blood, infections use our cells, but our illnesses are different. In a way, they’re self-inflicted. An error in the code. This kind—well—it owns us, it hurts us, because it just doesn’t understand.”
She learns that death isn’t playful. Death is sudden. It has no taste for irony or reason. It doesn’t wait for another tick of the metronome. It doesn’t wait for goodbyes.
Death is a taker, plain, direct, no tricks up its sleeve. And it will give you nothing in return but a last endless kiss for those you leave behind.
“Some people write so their name will be bigger than the title,”
It’s unfair. That those you take care of usually end up being the ones you care about.
When you’re empty, the wind can toss you side to side with ease. The sun can shine right through you.
Losing something unsaid is simpler than losing something you loved enough to name.
The moment someone realizes you’re going to die, they will not treat you the same way as if you were going to live.
Pain and I have a reasonable agreement. Pain is jealous. As long as I don’t feel anything else, it’s content staying at bay.
“Hope isn’t meant to save people,”
“You don’t realize how powerful loneliness can be till even hurting yourself isn’t painful enough to sate it.”
That’s why I bury memories. Living them once was enough. Reliving them is a destructive habit.
“Fear is just a large shadow with a little spine.
“Because they’re weak,” I explain. “Hurting you gives them power. Or at least an illusion of it.”
“It’s easier to pretend you, someone as small and weak as them, are the enemy when there’s a whale circling the boat.”
But time does not grant me a when. It is not that generous. It grants me an if…
“Hope is like…” He shifts, his chin against my ear now rather than my neck. “Hope is like waiting for the sun to rise,” he says, looking through his window, greeting the sky. “We don’t know if the stars will shine or if the sun will be here tomorrow, but I trust the stars. I trust the sun too.”
our diseases don’t make us who we are, but diseases are like pets. When you’re out with one in public, some people are repulsed, some are intrigued, but everyone is watching. It’s all they can see. And death may as well be a pet leashed to our wrists.
time will cease disease will fester death will die
Because the world was built for kids who dreamt of life and were raptured by loss. It is theirs, and it is mine. It is ours to claim, and it is ours to reap. In this place, freedom takes us by the hand, and we dance to its rhythm in coarse, cool sand and wild, welcoming waters.
REALITY ISN’T KIND to those who deny it. It thrusts itself back upon you, not with a knife in the back, but through the lung, staring down at you distastefully for leaving it behind.
Death isn’t playful. Death is sudden. It has no taste for irony or reason. It is a taker, plain, direct, no tricks up its sleeve. But at least, This time, Death was kind enough to wait for goodbye.
Some say it has two forms. It can be roaring and passionate. It swallows you, consumes you, the other person a source of breathing. Like a violent flame that burns out in a single night. Love can also be gentle, subtle. A wave washing into shore on a quiet afternoon. It settles over you till you become comfortable with the tide.
Children who experience illness can harden. It isn’t a response to pain, it’s a response to their life feeling stretched, thinned into a cycle. Memories blur into each other. A year in a hospital can feel like ten. Maybe that’s why so many patients have the wisdom of an old man and the temper of a child.
He says you don’t have to be sick to feel stuck.
how something as intangible as hope is lost. It cannot be misplaced. It cannot be thrown aside. That means it must be forgotten. Forgetting is an essential part of grief.
God has never spoken to me himself, herself, themself, whatever God may be. The closest I have ever come to it is the hospital’s chapel. It’s a rather run-down room with a cross hanging on the far wall and benches sitting in rows for worship.
Love doesn’t fade when people do.”
“Time will stop, disease will fester, and death will die.”
They need things to stay the same to make room for what has changed.
