my family lives in a different state

. . . and then I decided to spread my heart thin and happy, because why would I want to keep it all in one place?

prints c/o Bio Diversity Library

sometimes lonely times

On a side note you can’t love without risk. Sometimes love is a terrible idea, except that it’s not an idea. Sometimes love leaves suddenly and it’s as if you were lying to the other person all this time, or they were lying to you. Sometimes you love someone and they don’t love you back the way you want to be loved back and you think if they’ll just hear your case, if you present the evidence before them as if in a court of law, they will concede to your argument and love you the way you love them, forever even, and then you both get to be happy. But that’s not how it works. You jump from the plane and hope your parachute opens. The other person is that parachute. If you can, jump over water, and from not too great a height. But what am I saying here? As if you had a choice; as if love was a conscious decision. As if, “But it will never work” was some kind of valid argument. I was just thinking about a girl I liked and so I thought I’d say that. I’m stupid with my affection.

--Stephen Elliot

Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold onto something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain.

--Henry Rollins

(i was lonely/confused/all of it and etc for a long, long time, with only myself to blame, but things are getting better all the time.)

always new and always familiar

One day in December:

One day in January:

"What do you think being in love feels like?"

"I think it feels like being cozy underneath a blanket and reading a good book when you know there's a storm outside. And also like frolicking through fields. Mhm. What do you think?"

"I don't know. I really don't know. Maybe it feels like spring after a rain, when the air is chilly but nice and the ground is dewy and the trees are getting their leaves and the flowers are showing their faces. The promise of warmth. I miss that feeling in spring . . . Or like biting into a truly delicious apple and feeling the equally sweet and tangy juice on your lips and remembering how good apples can be and how all the mediocre apples in the world make this one perfect apple worth it." 

"Aw. Definitely. I think it's nice and safe and comforting and exciting and always new and always familiar."

excerpts

It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, nor sustain our souls.

--Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I remembered a summer day in 1970 when John and I stopped for a red light on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans and noticed the driver of the next car suddenly slump over his steering wheel. His horn sounded. Several pedestrians ran up. A police officer materialized. The light changed, we drove on. John had been unable to get this image out of his mind. There he was, he had kept saying later. He was alive and then he was dead and we were watching. We saw him at the instant it happened. We knew he was dead before his family did.
Just an ordinary day. 
"And then--gone." 

--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to that question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him or her. Most people don't know the operator has to listen, it is a law. Also, the postman is not allowed to go inside your house, but you can talk to him on public property for up to four minutes or until he wants to go, whichever comes first. 

--Miranda July, "The Shared Patio"

Maybe that was just life? One orphaning after the next. They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel. 

--Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac