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But the thing people don’t realize is that the past is a living, breathing entity that exists apart from our wishes or best intentions. It’s not gone, and it’s certainly not invisible. Its fingerprints are smeared all over every moment of the present, its weight drags on every second of the future, its consequences echo down every hallway of our lives. We can no more rid ourselves of the past than we could stop the earth from spinning.
But I have to seem like I’m making an effort because nobody likes a nihilist. You can only stay depressed for so long before people lose patience and start rolling their eyes behind your back.
I feel attacked by all the love around me. Personally victimized, as if love itself were mocking my pain, stabbing gleefully at me with poison-tipped knives.
I’ve never been looked at like this by a man, with such raw, unapologetic intensity. I feel naked. I feel seen.
I’m in danger here. Serious, imminent danger of being charmed senseless by a handsome artist who arouses in me the dueling urges to run away screaming or strip naked and fling myself onto his torso and cling there like a crab.
Our bones have a wisdom that our hearts will always follow, regardless of the roads down which our rational minds think we should head.
The United States of Advertising has made everybody insecure about their looks.”
“Whatever bad thing happened to you, it hasn’t made you less beautiful. There’s beauty in darkness, too. It just takes a different kind of vision to see it.”
Life’s too short to mince words. Our existence is measured in minutes. Seconds. Heartbeats. Time is the most valuable commodity we have, because it can never be replenished. Once it’s gone…it’s gone forever. And so are we.”
I’ve never felt this pretty. Pretty and feminine and powerful, all because this beautiful man is worshipping me with his possessive hands and ravenous eyes.
“Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.”
“Duris dura fraguntur.” It’s Latin, I know that much. I also know by the change in his voice that I’ve stepped into dangerous territory, but I can’t help but step farther. My curiosity is too strong. “What does it mean?” He answers in a low voice. “Hard things are broken by hard things.”
The idea of a life without creativity is too terrifying,
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
Dammit, I hate having a brain that manufactures magical portals out of everyday cracks in a wall! Life would be so much easier if I were an accountant.
His words thrill me and so does the passion in his eyes. But the passion is tempered by that darkness that wells up at unexpected moments, the darkness that should frighten me but instead makes me want to dive in deep and lose myself in it.
“You can’t talk to him about it, babe! What would you say? ‘I had my friend in the FBI take a peek at your entire life history because I thought you might be a psycho?’ How do you think he’d feel about that? Violated much?”
How can a dying man be so strong?
In fact, you don’t have to do anything with your emotions at all. You can simply acknowledge them as they arrive—oh, look, that old bitch Envy is back again—then go about your business. It’s the clinging to emotion that causes suffering, she said. A wiser choice is to let it go and breathe.
“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.”
“No one can offer you proof of reality, not even Einstein himself. But just because it can’t be proven doesn’t mean the sun won’t rise tomorrow. It will.”
It’s a terrible thing, living without hope. It’s the worst thing imaginable. A person can survive even the most brutal physical or emotional trauma if they believe—somehow, some way—there will be an end to it. But when there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, when every day is a cold, black, unending road of misery and hope is only a faint memory you once had, the only thing that can help is death.
For people in my position, death is a friend we wait for. The merciful friend whose face we long to see.
