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Tears prick my eyes. It’s just a little kindness, but it’s toward such a tender part of my life, it feels like the hardest hug and the biggest smile and the sweetest kiss. It feels good to be accepted, to be not only told but shown that I’m safe to be not just smiley Rooney or happy Rooney but all-of-me Rooney. Even the one who’s really fucking sick sometimes.
“I know they did their best, and I know, in their way, they love me. But sometimes people love you their best, and it’s still not enough.”
Reading about people who look and live and speak so differently from us, yet struggle like we do with their inner demons and outside forces, fight for love in their friendships and families and the people they’ve fallen for, reminds us that not only romantic love, but familial and platonic and sacrificial love is universal, and romance is timeless, that there’s a love story for anyone out there who wants one.”
I gave him a romance novel because they’re a safe place to step deeper into our emotions, the happy ones and the hard ones. To recognize and process complex, sometimes difficult feelings within ourselves that the world, in all its gendered, toxic bullshit, tells men we have no obligation to face and feel, when we really do. As humans, we owe it to ourselves to know our hearts.”
“Reading a book is just like opening your heart to someone. You won’t know if you’ll connect until you try.”
And that’s the best kind of friendship, isn’t it? Friendship that lets laughter and tears hold hands, where grief and gratitude can be friends, not enemies.
“If there’s something there between you, don’t waste a fucking minute, you hear me?”
‘We don’t laugh because we feel good, we feel good because we laugh.’
‘No mistakes . . . ’ ” “ ‘Just happy accidents,’ ” I tell her quietly, moved by the truth in those words. That’s what they are, the circumstances that led her here, that made us collide and our paths converge . . . not mistakes, even though they felt like it, but the happiest accidents. The ones that gave me her.
She glances my way and catches me staring at her. “You’re not watching the sunrise,” she says. “No.” A blush stains her cheeks as she smiles faintly, her expression perplexed. “You love sunrises.” “I love you more.”
I’m learning that being brave isn’t being fearless but rather facing our fears and not letting them dictate our lives. It’s living honestly in the imperfection of existence. It’s finding love in those messy places and fighting for it. And that is deeply vulnerable.
