Breathless

by Jennifer Niven

Because after suffering a loss, you become a ghost in your own body. You observe yourself doing things and saying things that you might not normally do or say. You need something to ground you and prove to you that you’re still here. As a way of feeling something. Anything.

Every person for themselves.

Don’t say a word. Don’t talk about it. Don’t let your feelings out. Keep quiet. Keep it inside. Silence.

“Tous les garçons et les filles.”

“There’s everything to do here. Depending on your attitude, of course.”

somewhere I can start over, where there aren’t people I love who will keep letting me down.

don’t hide behind yesterday or hold back from tomorrow.

What makes someone stop loving you? One day there’s love; the next day there’s not. Where does it go?

And everything, absolutely everything, was there.

“Where do you think love goes when people stop loving you? Do you think there’s, like, a junkyard where all the lost and discarded love is collected?”

“There’s beauty in every story. And there’s a story in everything.”

Try being an observer rather than a participant in life, and get yourself some empathy.

“Joy to the World”

heart-shaped deer vertebrae.

‘There are no ambitions noble enough to justify breaking someone’s heart.

Life is an accumulation of aches. They fill you up and take your breath away and you think you’ll never breathe again, but before you know it, you are just words on paper, gone quiet and asleep until someone finds those words and reads them.

There’s usually good hiding in people somewhere if you look hard enough.