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“A Poem for Margaret.” Once there was a you and me We were lovers We were friends Before life changed Before we were strangers Do you still think of me? —Joe
The city becomes a character in your life, a love you can’t take out of you. The mysteriously human element about this place can make you fall in love and break your heart at the same time. When you hear her sound, when you breathe in her scent, you share it with all the people walking beside you on the street, in the subway, or gazing from a tall building across Central Park. You know at once that you are alive, and that life is beautiful, precious, and fleeting. I think that’s why people in New York feel so connected to each other; the city harnesses this collective love and admiration.
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“Don’t forget, those are just tools. The music travels through the instruments, but it comes from you, from your soul.”
The best musicians are rule-breakers. The thing is that you have to know the rules before you can be any good at breaking them.”
We sat there in silence for a long time. I closed my eyes and then he said, “There’s music all around us, isn’t there?”
“You’ll be fine. Your mere existence is pleasing enough. Trust me.”
“Friends forever, though, right?” He studied my face carefully, and it looked as if he were cataloging the memory.
You can’t re-create the first time you promise to love someone or the first time you feel loved by another. You cannot relive the sensation of fear, admiration, self-consciousness, passion, and desire all mixed into one because it never happens twice. You chase it like the first high for the rest of your life.
It will never feel as intense as the first time.
we memorialize our past. Everything seems better in a memory.
Him serving the annulment papers to me proved to me that he wasn’t all-in like he said he was. He probably realized what I had realized: we were on separate paths.
Ughhhhhhhhh i HATE a miscommunication trope
“ ‘Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.’ ”
The present is our own. The right-this-second, the here-and-now, this moment before the next, is ours for the taking. It’s the only free gift the universe has to offer. The past doesn’t belong to us anymore, and the future is just a fantasy, never guaranteed. But the present is ours to own. The only way we can realize that fantasy is if we embrace the now.
There’s no taking your time because you think, even at the relatively young age of thirty-six, that your days are numbered.
Lol even at 22
They were deep-set, so dark they looked black. . . . They were my eyes.
Bhat to reread this back. WHAT?!???!!!????
