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The good news here is that if I banged the shit out of myself like I think I just did, I might just feel something tomorrow. It has to be better than feeling nothing, right? How’s that for a goddamn silver lining?
Wait, what’s less than silver? Iron? Zinc? Could there be a zinc lining?
So continues my endless search for physical feeling, sensation. Anything.
So I add frigid to the list. To that stupid mental inventory I try so hard not to keep. An increasingly large list of all of my flaws. My inadequacies. My failures.
I have mastered the art of melancholy.
I think again, determined to find something I’ve done that is worth recognition. I lived.
“I’m a regular fucking Harry Potter!”
I can’t look at myself because I cannot stomach looking at a girl who has so little hope left. Who is inexcusably weak. I am humiliated by my own inability to do better.
I see perfection in things that are likely considered imperfections by others.
“It makes you feel alive. It brings you crashing into the here and now. Keeps you alert and grounded.”
Death and grief make everyone around you vanish because death and grief are intolerable.
“You need songs that make you feel. Some make you strong, some make you weak. Some build determination, some tear you apart. But you need all of those.”
I am. It’s a constant struggle to stay near the surface. I have just enough air to stop me from totally going under, but not enough to thrive.
Never forget that the current, the tides, the waves… they are all smarter than you are. They are in charge. It’s your job to listen. Don’t ever stop listening.
It is surprisingly comforting to know that other people in the world suffer like I do.
He is telling me to protect my heart, but to love. He is telling me about timing, and dreaming, and surviving. And mostly, he is telling me to abandon my worry. To find joy and to live again.
It’s smart to end relationships that are poisonous. It’s a good thing. Sometimes you have to cut people out of your life to make things better. So you can move forward.
That’s why we are all here together in this room—because you don’t run after devastation. You stay and hold one another close. At least, that’s what you’re supposed to do, I’m learning.
We want to read too much into life because it’s convenient. Or fun. But there’s no imaginary, invisible man in the sky who makes things happen. There is no magical reason that we’re dealt what we’re dealt.
There is no set pattern to grief, despite what every stupid psych text has told me. There is no time frame that dictates when and how you’ll feel what you feel. You just get to deal with hell however, and whenever, it hits you.
“You are the great love of my life that I’m never going to have.”
“You said something last night that was completely wrong. Sleeping together was not a mistake. Blythe. I could never touch anyone the way that I touch you. And I will never regret falling in love with you. Don’t forget that.”
She is the past, and the present, and the future. She is through, and over, and under.
It made me the person who you think you love. And so you love me either because of that or in spite of it. Both of which are unbearable.”
was forced to become bulletproof and competent because I faced complete insanity.
If you can just push aside that rational, logical, fucking solidly cognitive piece of your thinking and just feel. Listen to your heart. The other shit? It doesn’t matter. The past? The horrible nightmare you’ve been through? We can handle that. We can. We already have, don’t you see that?
“I am overwhelmingly in love with you,” Chris says as he matches my steps. “I’ve spent most of my life thinking that my father never gave me anything but pain. But that’s not true. He did give me something. Someone. You. He gave me you. Last summer, you asked me to believe in us. I don’t believe in much, as you know, but I do damn well believe in us. Forever.”
