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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Bouncing on top of my head, it feels fun and light and like I’d be ready to roll if the forest pixies ever ask me to go dancing with them.
“it’s an untranslatable word. Wabi can mean rustic or stark or transient. Sabi is like . . . faded. Or fading. Old. Together, I guess it’s like seeing beauty in simplicity and nature. In fleeting moments and even in decay.”
I think I imagined the California coast with surfers running headlong into the waves and with pops of colorful umbrellas. But it’s quieter, just the whoosh of water and call of birds.
The natural world makes the finest architects and designers and artists look like silly amateurs.
There’s no point in guilt-tripping. She can’t make herself feel better. I can’t make her feel better—none of us can. The least we can do is not make it worse.
I don’t mind being introduced to people’s skeletons firsthand, in person. I more than don’t mind it. I prefer to reach right into the closet and shake their bony hands and say hello for myself.”
I try to do this thing when I get upset, when I start to float upward in a rage: I push all my anger down my arms. And then I snap my fingers, with both hands, trying to crush those feelings. The sound, the feel of that snap. Sometimes it brings me back to earth.
His presence in my life sets me on my journey, and I can feel it, a vital mission pulsing in my bones.
I don’t want to be another person he has to care for. I want to be someone he cares about.
But life surprises you. It tells you to close your eyes and blow out the candles, and then sometimes smashes your face into the cake before you can even make a wish. But! Sometimes, every once in a while, you get your wish in.
But I can’t let myself think about this—about how much can change in a year. It feels like someone driving the heel of their hand into my nose, in a street fight I didn’t know I was in.
Cognitively, I recognize my good fortune. But I don’t feel lucky.
I don’t appreciate how often people hide their scars and doubts. Really, it’s not fair to people who are struggling, to go on believing that everyone else just has it totally together and never has one bad thought in their lives. Like, I know you people sometimes lie awake at night torturing yourselves over the atrocities in this world and mortality and meaning. I know you’re not just daydreaming about riding a pink pony to your job as a cupcake taster.
No matter what heaven you believe in, your time on this earth will end. What I’m saying is that you should listen—really listen—to the slosh of the waves and the distant call of Pacific birds. You should feel a boy’s pulse against your cheek; you should fill your lungs with ocean air. While you can, I mean. You should do these things while you still can.
What if the tattoo and the scar and this summer’s freckles are my patina? Wabi-sabi says rust and faded paint hold beauty. So what if I let these marks be passport stamps from where I’ve been—ones that don’t determine a damn thing about where I’m going next?
But the point is that trying to make things better sometimes makes us better, too.
But finding each other was celestial, and this is how it must be.
His hand is on my cheek, looking at me so admiringly that I almost can’t believe I’ll walk away from this.
I almost try to explain another untranslatable word—nyat—to Jonah. The idea has Buddhist roots and several meanings, depending on context. I think emptiness is the closest word, but, in English, we infer emptiness as a void, a lack. Śūnyatā is open with possibility, a meditative space.
That’s the thing they never tell you about love stories: just because one ends, that doesn’t mean it failed. A cherry pie isn’t a failure just because you eat it all. It’s perfect for what it is, and then it’s gone. And exchanging the truest parts of yourself—all the things you are—with someone? What a slice of life. One I’ll carry with me into every single someday.