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“You can’t be really happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes.
It’s so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it’s taking forever to come. Then it happens and it’s over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.
A sharp blade of sadness goes through me, deep and quick. I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff.
It’s amazing how much comfort this thought gives me. It’s amazing how it breaks up the fear, like a tiny candle lit in the middle of the night, lighting up the shapes of things, burning away the dark.
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you—sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me—such bullshit.
know that life isn’t life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.
What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager schoolchildren, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be deceived?
Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t. But that isn’t it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you, God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.
