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“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” —James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
“You don’t think what I do is work? Cleaning, cooking, organizing, driving, taking care of our children. All tasks people pay to have done for them. Is it not a job because I do it for my family? Did you think all these years you were the only one working just because you left the house every morning?”
All loves aren’t created equal. Some spring from the earth and wrap around and twine through our souls like vines. Some are plants that start with tiny seeds in your heart and blossom over time, nurtured by years and commitment.
There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.
“You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.”
“Do I need to remind you that you’re a married woman, Yas?” I laugh. “Definitely not.” She smiles dreamily. “Josiah is it for me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate when a man like that enters the chat.”
“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence
In this moment he may even feel like a threat to the people around us—a nearly grown man angry and volatile. To me he is just mine, and more than anything, I want to make this better. All I have are these words, though, which sometimes prove useless, but I have to try.
It would be so tempting to lean on him when times are hard because a man like him will always be harder. Judah would be a wall, a fortress. A shelter. He’s the kind of man you can count on, but I’m done counting on men. He’s the kind of man who, with just a touch of his hand on yours, sends you into fantasies.
“I’m really enjoying this time on my own, if I’m being honest. I spent my whole adult life with Edward. I poured a lot into him. It’s time to pour into me.”
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
When conversing with the heart, expect it to talk back, to revisit the pains and disappointments that left the deepest dents and scratches.
There’s something bold about eating alone, enjoying your own company and not waiting for nobody.
With no more than a glance, he can enflame my senses.
You feel the loss of those you loved most acutely at the times when they made you feel so alive.
“when we kissed, it felt like this was what every other kiss in my life wished it could have been. It was natural, but otherworldly.
“I’ve come to realize that a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.”
Never has a man so affected me by simply holding my hand, but every time Judah takes my fingers in his, it’s like the sun trapped between our palms. And that point of contact is both searing and a comfort.
She loves an undeserving man. It’s a sorrow most women experience at some point in their lives, whether it’s a father who neglects or a son who forgets or a husband who betrays. These men let us down and we pull ourselves back up, hopefully with the help of other women who love us in ways that heal.
No one can love me like I do. No one knows me like I know myself.
When we have hard times, huge changes that seem to be the end of the world as we know it, it’s actually an incubator for metamorphosis. For a new beginning.
When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.
I know you want to be whole, but I think being whole means acknowledging all your parts. And there are parts of you that want to be held, want to be needed and loved. That is just as emotionally valid as the parts of you that crave independence.”
