Every Word You Cannot Say

by Iain S. Thomas

I know that you get ink on your fingers

and don’t know when it’ll come off.

I know strangers can stain your heart in...

I know you feel things and wish sometimes that someone was there to tell you that you’re allowed to feel everything you’re feeling. I know that, sometimes, you wish someone would just say the words you needed to hear because, sometimes, you don’t even know what those words are.

you are someone special, in someone else’s story.

don’t let anyone tell you how your story should go. Only you know how your story goes.

A story does not stop being a story when you turn the page.

You cannot say it is the absence of

them, and the presence of them, and the difference between those two things, that hurts the most.

We only hear the loudest voices when really, we should be listening to the quietest.

There is only one real sin in the end, and that is not being who you are, not listening to your soul, and forgetting who you wanted to be. It’s hard but without anything to overcome, we would not become ourselves. Sometimes, this is all meant to be hard.

An easy life is not a good life.

(What you feel is not brokeness, it is the desire to love yourself how you were meant to be loved. It is your heart crying out.)

But if we are the monster, and the person being chased, then we need to stop running because we cannot run away from ourselves.

The world will always wear you down, so let it wear you down until only the good remains. Hold on to the incredible parts of you that survive.

You love again. Recycle your heart. Someone out there needs it. —Remember this.

we all have things we think we don’t deserve.

There is a special kind of sadness that can only be found in the confusion between who you think you are and who you think other people want you to be.§

You’re hurt, so you hurt yourself some more.

But the correct response to pain, is self-love.

Often, we hate people not because they have wronged us, but because they have reminded us of some secret part of ourselves that we don’t like.

anger is your body’s way of telling you that you’re ready to change things.

Living the life you want, after you live the life you have, doesn’t actually work.

say these things I cannot say.

we put people who shouldn’t be in water in water,

It still hurts when the things and people I love are taken away from me.

the best people can’t be found on any map.

“It hurts because we have hearts. It hurts because we’re human and we need to hurt this way, or we’d be something else.”

We all miss something or someone we’re not supposed to miss.

But sometimes, being called stupid would hurt less than remembering.