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realizing you are the only boy you ever wanted to tear your dress off for.
Your life the first Christmas you spend alone. The years you learn to build your family from scratch.
They’re going to keep telling you your heartbeat is a preexisting condition. They’re going to keep telling you you are crime of nature.
on a night each of us was suffering from the unbearable loneliness of sanity.
even life is like funeral practice: half of us already dead to our families before we die, half of us still on our knees trying to crawl into the family photo.
Thirty times last month I thought, I can’t do this another day. Thirty times last month I did it another day. I lived with the hurt burrowing into my bloodstream, and still wanted more time more than I wanted
Picture the 738 selfies I deleted before I took one I was willing to show to the world. Picture me wishing I could get all of them back— my so-called flaws stacked like baseball cards I know will be worth something someday, like compassion, like tenderness,
Of all the violence I have known in my life I have never known violence like the violence I have spoken to myself,
worshipped the red flag fought god for the rights to the apocalypse
WHITE FEMINISM [NOUN] 1. A racism that claims it is at least better than no feminism at all, like at least Hitler was a vegetarian,
your sister thought the hearse was a limousine until she asked where it was going,
Do you ever feel like the best of you is something you’re still hoping to grow into?
When my grandma died I went home and made a snow angel on her grave, and then I made another so she wouldn’t be alone. I heard loneliness resonates in the same part of the brain as physical pain.
DEAR TINDER, I know it’s not your fault she lied to me, but you did make it so easy for her to swipe the sweetness off my face.
Is that what happens to the NRA? they ask after they’ve watched the bodies of half their class use every red crayon in the universe to scream goodbye.
The footprints left by astronauts on the moon are permanent. They will never ever go away like the grief of a father identifying his son by his shoes because the rest of his son’s body was out-lobbied by the NRA, by suits whispering into the ears of Washington— this is what we mean by freedom and justice, the names of our cities becoming synonymous with babies being buried like seeds in the greed gardens of the wealthy. But you should know your teacher was a hero, we say. Her body was found bunkering a group of your friends.
while America reloaded, and moved on to the next.
DEPRESSION [VERB] 1. to put on your best outfit and feel like you’re dressing a wound.
comparing Trump to Hitler. One, a failed painter who blamed the Jewish people for the beauty his heart was too ugly to make. The other, a con artist with enough failed humanity to eye our dying planet and focus on Miss America’s weight.
think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately to not stir into the recipe of who we are now.
But no one heals what they refuse to look at. So when asked if I think you’re a good person, I say, I don’t believe in good people. I believe in people who are committed to knowing their own wounds intimately.
RESENTMENT [VERB] 1. Loading the past into a cannon to murder this year.
Me, I often feel like I’m the vaccine for goosebumps. I can’t remember the last time someone commented on my sunny disposition.
know it is its own injury, spending too much of your life just holding yourself together
I got in my car and started driving toward a dead end, a cliff that had been my back-up plan if ever the pain got stronger than I am.
but a wise heart told me it’s the most tender part of queerness—how we’ve all lost so much family when we find people we call family, we’ll do almost anything to not let go.
