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everything that is broken was once whole and can be fixed again with a bit of time, understanding and love.
“Everything in this world comes in equals and opposites. Pull and push. Left and right. Yin and yang. Love and hate. Beginning and end. What is pleasure without pain?”
“My name is Jason. Jason Finnegan-Hart. Nice to meet you, coffee stain girl.”
“Do not fall in love with me,” he warns. The playfulness has disappeared and a hard look replaces it. I should tell him that I am not going to. I should say that I am not interested, but instead, I ask, “Why not?” “Because I’ll end up breaking your heart.”
I thought I had found my Prince Charming. He was everything and more. Until he wasn’t. Until I was competing with every girl he came across. I never won. My confidence was knocked until it didn’t exist.
“We all have a heart, Jason. It’s what keeps us all alive.” “It’s what makes us weak. Love is a weakness, Avalanna.”
“And where has love left you before? Did it give you everything you wanted, or did it take everything you had?”
“If you want to win in this world, you can’t have a heart.”
“I need to do things differently next time. I need to do it properly. I have to make sure I know who I am letting in my life. I thought I knew Kai, but I only ever knew the side he wanted to show me. I was so desperate to feel loved that I accepted it, despite the little bells going off in my brain. I want the chance to live the love stories I have spent my life reading and dreaming about. I owe myself that. I refuse to put myself through that pain again.”
I want a boyfriend and to fall in love, but no one seems interested in me. I am a sad little island, all on my own.
We conceal our grief the same way we hid the abuse. I wish she had someone to hold her. I wish she wasn’t alone. I don’t want that for her, and I don’t want that for myself. I think that’s why I want to fall in love so badly. I want someone who is my person. The person I go to for everything, who supports me and my dreams and is my comfort person. You know, the type that knows something is bothering you just by looking at you. I want that and I am determined to find him. He is out there somewhere.
Always remember, we are bound by the choices we make and sometimes die because of them.”
“We only have one life, Avalanna. One life to do all the things we love and overcome our fears. Don’t spend your life being afraid of what may come. Find the courage and get on the ride for all its highs and lows.”
“Take my hand and I will show you how to get through the darkness.”
“It’s called falling in love. Because that is what happens. You trust people and you give them your heart and you ruin yourself. I told you there is a piece of me missing, and that is my heart, and it is for reasons like this. I won’t trust and I won’t give my heart because it means I will fall. And what happens when you fall, Avalanna? You break. That’s why heartbreak exists. You see, it’s not falling in love. It’s simply falling for heartbreak.”
“Well, I hope that every time you look at it, you remember you are capable of being number one. You are enough. Stop waiting for someone to validate who you are. You are your own person. Don’t wait for someone to swoop in and save you. Be your own hero.”
You can die wishing, or you can die trying.
“You can’t chase happiness. That is why you are struggling to breathe.
If you can’t love me, let me find someone who will. I have already lived a story where my dreams turned into a nightmare.”
How do I explain that it never starts with a push or slap? Kai made sure I felt like I couldn’t live without him, so I truly felt trapped when that first blow came. The thought of being alone was worse than the fear of being hit. It sounds irrational to me now, but that Ava was naïve. She believed him when he swore it wouldn’t happen again. She believed him when he blamed her after it did happen. She believed in him and that her love would change him.
Jason walks in step with me. “He might be the father, but you can still call me daddy.”
As she danced in the rain, with the lights behind her, laughter on her lips and the stars watching, I finally understood the word ‘beautiful’. I thought of many things as beautiful before, but nothing compared to this. To her. She was a ray of light in the dark. She was the brightest star in the sky. She was good. She was pure. She was happiness. She was truly an unrivalled beauty.
“Because I wanted to see how far I could break you until you learnt to fight back.”
“What did I ever do to make you hate me?” I sob. “Everything. From the very moment, I laid my eyes on you, I have hated you. Do you understand now, Avalanna? I hate you,” he says, emphasising every word. “I hate you so fucking much. I hate you. I fucking hate you. I hate you!” He throws his glass across the room and I duck as it shatters around me the way my heart has done. “This is me, Avalanna! This is who I am! I break everything I fucking touch. I am everything wrong in this world. I am fucking cursed. I don’t have a heart and I want to forget all the things you see in the world. I don’t
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“I am heartbreak. Choosing me is choosing to fall for heartbreak. There is no happy ending in my story.”
Sometimes I wish I didn’t live my life with my heart leading.
I want someone to answer my questions. I need someone to tell me that this will get easier. It has to get easier because this pain is unbearable. How much heartbreak can one person bear? There has to be a way out of this dark tunnel because I can’t spend the rest of my life suffocated by the pain other people have inflicted on me.
“You need to learn how to let go of people, Avalanna. Your inability to let go of those who hurt you will be the death of you. How much does someone have to take from you before you wake the fuck up?”
Sometimes, when you love someone, the best thing is to let them go. You don’t hold them back and tie them to your darkness. Let them be free and fly.”
“You have a choice in who you become in the world. You can choose to take away light from people, or you can choose to bring light into their lives. The light can be scary when someone has been in darkness for so long. Always remember that some people look like light, but they are fighting darkness. Those are the ones that need your light the most.”
He may never have physically hit me but what about the bruises he left on my heart? Did they not matter?”
“It’s not the letting go part that is hurting you. It’s the betrayal from the person you trusted most. It’s knowing that you allowed yourself to bleed to protect them from the knives others tried to stick in their back. All the while, they sharpened their knife and stuck it into your back, straight to your heart.”
she was the saddest when he was gone. My mum never let me see that sadness, though. She held my hand and loved me even though her heart was broken.
“Pain is part of life. We can’t escape it. We have to learn how to overcome it. You can’t stop living in fear of being hurt. Love has hurt me more than once, but I won’t give it up in fear of it hurting again.”
“There are much bigger and more important things than love. Don’t sell yourself short for the sake of feeling loved. Feeling loved and being loved are two completely different things.”
“Tonight, you go home with him, and I go home with her. But tomorrow? Tomorrow it’s me, you and the stars.”
“You value love before everything else, including yourself. If you chose yourself instead of love, you would have been able to walk away. But it is more important for you to feel loved than it is to be happy.”
“Love yourself enough that you don’t need it from someone else.” He points at the picture again. “Where has loving someone else ever gotten you?”
“I want to kill him for leaving a scar on you,” he whispers.
like the night. It brings me peace. The world is quiet. It’s just me, my thoughts and the stars. Things were constantly changing in my life, but at night, the stars always remained. I could be myself; I could tell them whatever I wanted and they never judged me; they never left. They came back every night even when I didn’t deserve the company.”
He broke me, and eventually, I became someone I didn’t recognise.”
“People change, Avalanna. People change; they come and go. Time passes by. Life is brought into the world and subsequently taken away. People fall in love only to fall out of it. Things are always changing. Wars are fought, you can move countries, decades can pass. But the stars… the stars remain constant; they stay the same. They have witnessed an eternity of promises being made and broken. They listen to the secrets of the night. They come out in the dark for all those who are in need of some light. They never abandon you. You asked why I like the stars? They haven’t let me down – they are
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He was my light at the end of the tunnel, the fire warming me during the cold nights, saving me from death. Little did I know how that fire would be the death of me.
am the darkness to your light. I am the heartbreak to your love. You cannot save me.”
“This is the heartbreak! Every single moment with you is heartbreak! Every moment without you is heartbreak! I can’t do this, Jason! It’s like the heartbreak is clawing up my body and wrapping its way around my heart. I can’t breathe.”
“I am sick and tired of people claiming they saved me. I got myself out of that gutter. I crawled out of that hellhole. I put one foot in front of the other and climbed the fucking mountain. I got myself to where I am. Don’t you dare take credit for something I did on my own.”
Just because someone was once good to you, doesn’t mean they are owed your forgiveness. It’s okay to accept that some things aren’t meant to last forever.
“Sometimes I forget that the world has continued to move while I have been stuck.”
thought I could love you enough for both of us.
I am drawn to your light like a moth to the flame, but if you know what is good for you, you will cut me off before I burn your flame out.”
