Our Numbered Days

by Neil Hilborn

Pretension can look like intelligence if you squint hard enough or wear glasses.

maybe things do happen for a reason but that reason is stupid.

I’m so lucky we all lived through who we were to become who we are.

Home is wherever people know our stories. Sam Cook

And when your fourth love leaves you, you will want to kill yourself but you won’t. You no longer think of suicide as a house you will build one day.

turn off the radio: she can’t sleep without noise—you can’t sleep without noise, but noise will sound like her whispering you into the world of lights and breakfast; make the rain sound like nothing, make the rain sound nothing like her voice. Don’t be alone. When you are alone, you won’t do anything you did with her, so you won’t do anything.

Because she filled something in you that’s still full, even though she’s gone.

So maybe love is a form of crying. Catie Rosemurgy

I have been wondering, mostly, if love and sanity are the same thing. When I say I am in love I am also saying the world makes sense to me right now.

You will never be more wrong than the first time you say “I love you.” You will mean it, sure, but you’ll still be lying.

It is impossible to imagine a color you have not seen. Instead of dying, the jellyfish simply ceases to move. I complete five crosswords a day because it stops the panic. Trucks are downshifting on Main Street. Hair is partially composed of cyanide. Napalm is just gasoline and plastic. I am just carbon and bad timing.

Fun as meditation, meditation being doing exactly what you want to do at the exact moment you want to do it. When I say “I am having fun” I am also saying “I can’t imagine being anywhere else.” So suck it, depression. I don’t need you, I have not needed you, and even when I don’t mean it I will say I’m having fun and I don’t want to be anywhere else. I will wield my joy like a broadsword or a fucking nerf gun. I will have fun like my life depends on it because it does.

honesty is like an ugly puppy. I don’t want it.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore. Van Gogh

whatever you are feeling right now, there is a mathematical certainty that someone is feeling that exact thing. This is not to say you aren’t special. This is to say thank god you aren’t special.

isolation is not safety, it is death. If no one knows you’re alive, you aren’t. If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, it does make a sound, but then that sound is gone. I am not saying you will find the meaning of life in other people. I am saying that other people are the life to which you provide the meaning.

Love how you hate yourself sometimes, because goddamn, at least there’s still something to hate.

The best way to get to heaven is to take it with you. Henry Drummond