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The coolest boys are always tall and Jewish and have a car.
I sang “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and Joe Sawyer sat at the front and closed his eyes because earlier we’d talked about Jeff Buckley and basically he is the only boy I’ve ever met who fully understands me and where I’m coming from.
JEFF BUCKLEY AHHH
When I finally have a boyfriend, little else will matter.
Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay, and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down.
All of London is mine, I thought. Anything is possible.
I was a comfortable size 14—but I didn’t really mind that I wasn’t very slim. I still kissed the boys I wanted to kiss. I could wear Topshop. And I loved food and cooking. I understood that that was the trade-off.
And the more perfect I strove to be, the more imperfections I noticed.
You can try as hard as you can to block it out, but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.
A breakup will never be as hard as the first one. You’ll float around aimlessly in the months afterward, feeling as lost and confused as a child, questioning all the things you knew to be true and contemplating all the things you have to relearn.
When you can’t fall asleep, dream of all the love affairs with olive-skinned, curly haired men that lie ahead of you.
A universal, silent Morse code for I’m here, I love you. At that moment I realized that everything had changed: we had transitioned. We had chosen each other. We were family.
“They’re in love, she’s changed. That’s fine, it’s part of growing up.”
The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.
But I feel so far behind you and I’m worried you’ll run out of sight.”
The invisible dimension created from the history and love and future we shared for this one person. It was then I knew everything had changed: we had transitioned. We hadn’t chosen each other. But we were family.
Your best friends will abandon you for men.
I think i've seen this film before.
ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality
You are not who you thought you’d be.
I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with—a notion that was so foreign to me.
I wondered if I would ever have that with someone or if I was even built to float in a sea of love. Whether I even wanted to.
He’s got his half of the story and I’ve got mine; we carry them round like those tacky teenage necklaces of a heart split in two.
She wanted her own identity and independence. She was weary of her peers. She escaped into books and films and music. She was an obsessive; always tracking down every word ever written by her new favorite writers, watching every film ever made by her favorite directors back-to-back.
She is me and i am her
“I always think of you when the weather is like this. This is your favorite kind of day,”
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.
Every room I unlocked, I knew I was getting closer. To a sense of self, a sense of calm. And a sense of home.
“I see all the boys I’m going to fall in love with and the books I’m going to write and the flats I’m going to live in and the days and the nights that lie ahead.
We talked about the rain. I told him how much I loved it; more than blue skies and sunshine.
“Sometimes the gap between the little faith you have compared to the unwavering faith of others is a very moving thing.”
It was the physical equivalent of a rushed sandwich in a motorway service station—something you thought you were looking forward to then the minute you get to it you wonder why.
Oh.
I’m visible; to believe I’m here. I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeline. That’s not where I come alive.
The lyrics of the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” are the most neatly worded explanation of the reality of life and summarize the initial optimism then crashing bathos that is the first five years of one’s twenties with elegant concision.
I know that love happens under the splendor of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in the emergency room or in the queue for a passport or in a traffic jam. 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.
I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer. It wasn’t the bricks around me that I’d somehow managed to rent or the roof over my head that I was most grateful for. It was the home I now carried on my back like a snail. The sense that I was finally in responsible and loving hands.
If you lose respect for someone, you won’t be able to fall back in love with them.
You’re not an object to be won, you’re a human made of flesh and blood and guts and gut feelings.
I noticed, for example, that I had—quite suddenly and without realizing—completely given up the habit of taking photos of amusing road signs.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.
Roving, raucous, and rebellious. My roaming decade; my roaring twenties.
To choose to love is to take a risk. Always. That’s why it’s called falling—no one meanders-with-a-compass-and-Ordnance-Survey-map into love.
“Inside we are all seventeen with red lips,” I once read Laurence Olivier said. I agree with
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.
