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If it was not only your future on the line, but also your past. Not only the places you are going, but the footprints you have left behind. If it was all of it, all of you, who would you give yourself up for?
your hometown is something you can never really escape, but can never really go home to, either.
I hope my younger self would have read it and found it to be . . . well . . . not horrible. I think he and I could have gone for a beer. Talked about choices. I would have shown him pictures of my family and he would have said, “Alright. You did alright.”
Fredrick and his words have a special place in my heart 🥺❤️🩹
Most of us so desperately want to believe that every heart which stops beating is missed equally. If we’re asked, “Are all lives worth the same?” the majority of us will reply with a resounding “Yes!” But only until someone points to a person we love and asks: “What about that life?”
Maybe everyone feels that way about their hometown: the place we’re from never apologizes, never admits that it was wrong about us. It just sits there, at the end of the motorway, whispering: “You might be all rich and powerful now. And maybe you do come home with expensive watches and fancy clothes. But you can’t fool me, because I know who you really are. You’re just a scared little boy.”
When five-year-old girls die, no one writes about that, there aren’t any memorials in the evening papers, their feet are still too small, they haven’t had time to make anyone care about their footsteps yet.
But the vast majority of successful people don’t become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.
Every parent will take five minutes in the car outside the house from time to time, just sitting there. Just breathing and gathering the strength to head back inside to all of their responsibilities. The suffocating expectation of being good, coping.
The only thing of value on Earth is time. One second will always be a second, there’s no negotiating with that.”
I didn’t take you to school, didn’t hold your hand, didn’t help you blow out your birthday candles, I never fell asleep in your bed, halfway through our fourth bedtime story, with your cheek on my collarbone. But you’ll have everything that everyone else longs for: Wealth. Freedom.
Stop it 😭😭 its so heartbreaking
I abandoned you, but at least I abandoned you at the top of the hierarchy of needs.
You were always someone who could be happy. You don’t know how much of a blessing that is.
I was drunk, of course, so I remembered the steps outside the house where you and your mother lived, and all the times you had sat there waiting for me when I didn’t turn up like I’d promised. All the occasions I’d wasted your time.
You never played poker again. I failed with you. I tried to make you tough. You ended up kind.
Happy people don’t create anything, their world is one without art and music and skyscrapers, without discoveries and innovations. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed, they don’t devote their lives to curing illnesses or making planes take off. The happy leave nothing behind. They live for the sake of living, they’re only on earth as consumers. Not me.
I saw two dogs running into the sea, playing in the waves. And I wondered: Have you ever been like that, as happy as they are? Could you be that happy? Would it be worth it?
“It’s not enough for you to die. To make room for the girl’s entire life, another life has to cease to exist. I have to delete its contents. So if you give your life, it’ll disappear. You won’t die, you’ll never have existed. No one will remember you. You were never here.” A life for a life. That’s what it means.
“You never get your child’s attention back,” your mother once said. “The time when they don’t just listen to you to be nice, that time passes, it’s the first thing to go.”
Brb my parent issues are screaming at me rn 🏃🏽♀️
You humans always think you’re ready to give your lives, but only until you understand what that really involves. You’re obsessed with your legacy, aren’t you? You can’t bear to die and be forgotten.”
“Every night, I wondered whether it was possible to change a person.” “What did you conclude?” “That we are who we are.”
A second is always a second; that’s the one definitive value we have on earth. Everyone is always negotiating, all of the time. You’re doing the deal of your life, every day. This was mine.
“You’re not scared. You’re just grieving. No one tells you humans that your sorrow feels like fear.”
“What are we grieving?” “Time.”
