The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

when you personalize something to the extent many people do in politics, any time anyone questions something the party does, it can feel like they’re questioning you, and that’s just plain unhealthy.

Preach

Death is confronting for sheltered people because it fractures realities.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories,

It’s a funny part of growing up, actually… Accepting that things that are better for you, healthier—they can still be painful.

I find it personally offensive that men look effortlessly sexy in the mornings, I really do. It’s a great unfairness and an uneven distribution of power. The division of power says that women get sex and beauty, and if that’s the case, and it’s our commodity—we should have it at the ready, twenty-four seven.

What with people like these idiot girls with bright eyes and dull hearts, not a hair out of place but hearts in the wrong one. Girls like them who bat their eyes as they pick and choose from the Bible to create a world they’re comfortable to exist in.

“People read the Bible wrong. It’s a diary of normal people, like us, from thousands of years ago, trying to make sense of the God they’d heard of from their ancestors. They didn’t write it for us to read it now. And I think people read it without the true social or historical context, and they bring their own instead.”

He loved me a dysfunctional amount, and love and dysfunction are a peculiar pairing that flavor everything with a specific brand of contradiction. See, Oliver loved me so much—too much, you might even say—that he’d rather leave me hurting if it meant it hurt me less at the time.

being there for other people, but avoiding grief is a kind of grief. It’s what we do when we can’t feel what we need to feel to progress.

But elastic wears over time. It stretches more, gets thinner, loses its shape. Even when you want it to snap back to what it was, it doesn’t always work like that.

Contempt is funny like that. You can be resentful of something, hateful even—and still be jealous of it. I hated my dad for all the ways he wasn’t there for me and Oliver, but I still wanted him to want to be my dad.

Wondering and questioning why things are the way they are, not accepting the present and permanent—they’re all really solid ways to slow down progress.

“People don’t develop substance dependencies by dealing with their problems; they develop them to numb them.”

He looks up, and the way his whole face lifts when he sees me makes me want to cry on the spot, because how many people just light up because you walk into the room? One in a lifetime, two maybe?

You know how there’s a good kind of hurting? Like rubbing out a cramp? Or great sex, sometimes? Being near him hurts me all over my body. I think it’s because he’s what all the songs are singing about. Every single fucking one of them, they’re singing about him.

I think it’s so interesting that the names of things can change after something bad happens to them.

“Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” I stare up at the big arch, which is my favorite part, I think. “Even though it’s broken?” “Yep,” he says quietly, and he’s looking just at me.