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Life isn’t finished with you when you are eighteen or when you think you’ve had enough. It’s never enough. You’re never in the clear.
Books are something to be stepped inside of, to be occupied and lived in.
Reading, for me, has always been more like playing a video game than watching a movie, an active experience that used to leave me physically and emotionally wrought.
There’s just as many ways to handle grief as there are emojis, I guess. They all suck.
“It’s the government that’s doing it. All that sugar. If they can keep you fat and lazy and dependent on the health care system, it keeps you pliant. Like religion. Or Netflix.
I want to tell him that the bad things will find a way in, no matter what he does. I want to say that I, too, thought I was safe because I loved friends and stories and life more than I liked material possessions, but it turns out that even the safest things can be ripped from you between one heartbeat and the next.
When he looks down at me, I can tell he’s not a supernova like Jenna, an old star burning its way out of this galaxy and into the next. He’s brand new, a soul still learning how to navigate this odd world of whales and clever winds. Like me.
It feels rather like we just took out a giant troll in the bathroom, or fought our way to Mordor, shoulder to shoulder. It’s true: there are some things you can’t go through together without ending up friends.
“Everything is silly, dear. Life is too brief to be anything else.”
At first, he is no one, like everyone is no one when they first wake. There is a moment between sleep and waking where anything can happen and it feels like a person might be wiped clean, their entire life rewritten almost by accident.
“In the interest of our years of friendship and maintaining what matters, I’m going to hug you,”
When did emotions start having emotions of their own, and how do I make it stop?
It’s a picture I took of a tree bent over on itself, its long, thick branches scraping the ground near the trunk, forming a natural archway. I used to think it was beautiful, a portal to another world. But now I wonder if it can still be called a tree if it lives bent in two rather than stretching toward the sky.
“The dead can hold more sway than the living.”
Sometimes the best way to absolve the guilty is to let them feel the weight of their culpability, no matter how untrue.
“Fate doesn’t need to be believed in for it to be true.”
“I hate endings,” he says. “Hate them. If the story is good, it’s never going to be long enough.” The words are out of my mouth before I can hold the sentence in my head. “But we keep reading.”
Every heroine from every story I’ve ever read is bursting from her bindings to come flutter in my chest and assure me that this is okay, this feeling of bigness and rightness and wrongness all mixed together. It’s more than okay that I am experiencing something other than grief. It’s okay that I’m not entirely sure if the feeling is a good one or a bad one.
