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“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”
“Oh, it’s fine, we’ll be together wherever we go next. We’ll just have to meet each other there.”
The back wall of my eyeballs finally gave way and tears poured out from the deepest well in the pit of my stomach.
This woman with no sense of self, no self-regard, no self-esteem—a shapeshifting, people-pleasing presence; a tangled knot of anxiety—was being given permission to just be.
Me and the philodendron were doing a thing together.
“I vow to not judge however you handle this when we get home,” I said. “If you want to have a really heavy amphetamine and casual sex phase, that’s fine. If you lock yourself in your house for a year, that’s fine too. You’ve got my support whatever you do, because I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose the people you’ve lost.” “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip of her prosecco and pausing to think. “I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids. I know you’re going through a period of big change
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And if this is it, if this is all there is—just me and the trees and the sky and the seas—I know now that that’s enough.
We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live.
even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it.
If you feel exhausted by people, it’s because you’re willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. It’s your problem, not theirs.
And I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing.
Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.
You’re not an object to be won, you’re a human made of flesh and blood and guts and gut feelings.
What’s the point? Surely this is the question that glues together all the sharp fragments of any age-related crisis.
“I think it’s the Grim Reaper on a stand-up paddle-board,”
marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.
