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It says something that I can no longer find the words to describe it properly. That it’s been so long I don’t even remember how it feels. I miss feeling beautiful. I miss feeling passion. I miss feeling.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my years surrounded by people and still feeling completely alone…
Nash managed to check all my boxes while also somehow leaving them all unchecked.
Her perceptive eyes locked on mine and I knew she saw that I was hiding how lost I felt. Harlow always saw. My sister collected people’s stories and catalogued their reactions. A version of this conversation would end up in one of her books and somewhere down the line, I’d have the uncomfortable opportunity to confront myself, the way my sister saw me.
Everyone professed to being happy, but the light I was used to seeing in their eyes had dimmed. It was like looking at a faded photograph. I wondered if they would say the same thing about me.
Was losing the light a natural side effect of growing up? Was the reality of life destined to dull even the brightest soul?
‘still-small voice.’”
If there’s a part of you that’s whispering, you have to listen. Life is meant to be lived, not survived.
A soul that pure needed to be loved, not neglected.
You’re in my head now and I’m not sure I want you there. And my whole world got turned upside down and I have no idea what I’m going to do, but every time I close my eyes, I see you.
The way I see the world is a constant question mark because I want freedom as much as I want security and I want stability as much as doing the same thing every day bores me.
And here’s the thing. All this chaos in my life should leave me terrified. It should keep me awake at night. It should make me want to curl up and give up, but it hasn’t. It’s like there’s a fire in my belly and it’s telling me to grow. To move. To change.
When I turned to him and caught his eyes, that still-small voice gasped. This! it yelled, though I didn’t understand what it meant.
I stammered out a reply, something that would surely embarrass me if I could think straight enough to know what I said.
There could be healing here, but there could also be destruction.
“The whole world is caught up in timing, as if there’s a perfect time for everything to happen. Like we can schedule ourselves right down to the minute. It’s not natural. If the right person appears in your life, does it really matter when?”
To some degree, we all feel like islands, surrounded by people facing slightly different directions, heading down slightly different paths.
the biggest thoughts are the hardest to articulate.
Change sucks and it’s easier to settle for the devil we know than to risk opening our life to the possibility of even more hellfire and brimstone.
Arrived? The only place we’re aiming for is the grave. Life is movement, sometimes fluid and graceful, sometimes harsh and jolting, but things are always moving and changing. I don’t want to ‘arrive’ because that means it’s time to stop. I fought too hard to ever stop again.
Life is supposed to be about the journey, but all too often, we’re so focused on where we think we’re going, we never appreciate where we are.
Life is too short and too fragile not to say what you mean and go after what you want. Why sit frozen in fear when you can move?
hurt and confused and wearing the kind of scars that rip through a heart and soul—the kind that come when love was given and then taken away without reason or explanation.
When I was younger, I used to worry about, well, everything. School. Grades. Friends. The color of my hair. When my anxiety was at its worst, my mom would take me out on the porch. She’d point at the stars, whispering their names to me. These have been here for more years than you can understand, she’d say. And no matter how bad your grades are, they’ll still be here tomorrow.
There are things we see and experience that can’t be undone.
We all believe the people we love and the things we have will be with us for the rest of forever. All of it an illusion, a house of cards built on shifting sands.
We were still very much strangers. We were still wearing masks.
If I had my way, I’d never see the darker side of him again. I wanted to be the light that chased away his demons.
It was a razor’s edge of love, bitter and sweet, difficult and pure. It filled me up and cut so deeply, I had to look away from the thoughts or I would drift off, awash in too many emotions to name.
But for anything to be good, there must also be bad. How could there be yin without yang? How could one appreciate the light, if they had never seen the dark?
