Every Day (Every Day, #1)

by David Levithan

After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why. You can have theories, but there will never be proof.

We all contain mysteries, especially when seen from the inside.

It’s as simple as that. Simple and complicated, as most true things are.

Putting up with the fear of being with the wrong person because you can’t deal with the fear of being alone. The hope tinged with doubt, and the doubt tinged with hope.

There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred.

The moment you fall in love feels like it has centuries behind it, generations—all of them rearranging themselves so that this precise, remarkable intersection could happen.

It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else falling in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

I know I shouldn’t be doing this. I know I’m poking a wound, not healing it.

I can see that the sadness has returned. And it’s not a beautiful sadness—beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.

Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen.

It is a mistake to think of the body as a vessel. It is as active as any mind, as any soul.

“That doesn’t mean anything, does it? I mean, being with someone for over a year can mean that you love them … but it can also mean you’re trapped.”

The sound of words as they’re said is always different from the sound they make when they’re heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.

“Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn’t have to venture deep down in order to get to love.”

I know everything is about to change, and I fear that one day I will long for this minute before anything is said, that I will want to travel back in time and undo what’s coming next.

When I pictured this conversation in my head, I could imagine it going in two ways: revelation or revulsion. But now we’re stuck somewhere in between.

Falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel.

I have no idea whether I owe him an explanation or not. I probably owe him something. But I’m not sure it’s an explanation.

Imagine being homesick, but without having a home.

Self-preservation isn’t worth it if you can’t live with the self you’re preserving.

This is the trap of having something to live for: Everything else seems lifeless.

She has been left to her own devices, and those devices are broken.

she doesn’t want to be trapped in the bus with other kids. It’s not that she’s bullied—she’s too busy bullying herself to notice. The problem is the confinement, the inability to leave.

There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with.

But the thing about a cry for help is that someone else needs to be around to hear it.

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals.

Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person’s heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.

If smart people are parodying it, that’s a sure sign that some less smart people are believing it.

And while I once thought what I wanted from her was this normal, everyday tone, now that I have it, the normalcy disappoints.

I am like the fish in the aquarium, thinking in a different language, adapting to a life that’s not my natural habitat.

There are moments when I don’t think about her, or even think about me. There are moments I just sit in my frame, float in my tank, ride in my car and say nothing, think nothing that connects me to anything at all.

Not getting what you want can make you cruel.

“I’m just me,” I tell her. “I always feel at home and I never feel at home. That’s just the way it is.”

Because when something happens, she’s the person I want to tell. The most basic indicator of love.

I know our nakedness is as much a form of trust as it is a form of craving.

I spend the rest of the night staring into that blank space. And I can’t help but feel it staring right back.

It’s the kind of anger that comes when you feel betrayed by not just a single person, but the universe.

If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the initially painful and ultimately comforting process of finding it.

He doesn’t just look upset—he looks newly blind. There is such loss in his eyes, and it permeates every other part of his body.

He unspools the memories, and sometimes they have knots in them, and sometimes they are frayed, but they are the things he thinks of when he thinks about his father.

It doesn’t feel like a date. It doesn’t feel like friendship. It feels like something that fell off the tightrope but hasn’t yet hit the net.

The tenderness between two people can turn the air tender, the room tender, time itself tender.

So much happiness can only make me sad.