I don’t want to hurt you or anybody so please forget about me. Just try. Find yourself a better friend.
You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.
The best things aren’t perfectly constructed. They aren’t illusions. they aren’t larger than life. They are life.
It was the moment I realized what music can do to people, how it can make you hurt and feel so good all at once.
The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready.
dear today, i spend all of you pretending i’m okay when i’m not, pretending i’m happy when i’m not, pretending about everything to everyone.
I’ll make a swing so I can reach the places I can’t reach yet.
He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.
I imagine what would happen if everyone turned their regrets into wishes, went around shouting them.
It isn’t the happy ending Ingrid and I had dreamed up, but it’s all a part of what I’m working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and hold you close.
You’re never going to be ready”…”Don’t you see that? You have to forget about ready. If you don’t, you’re always going to run away
I was so blinded by her talent that I didn’t recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.
How it’s so easy for her to not feel anything at all, to be just completely gone, to not be around to see how fucked up she’s made me. She got to disappear completely and I feel like I’m about to combust.
No,” I say. “I didn’t know that,” and as I say it I feel flooded with bitterness at all the things Ingrid kept secret from me.
That’s what friends do: they notice things. They’re there for each other. They see what parents don’t.
I was such a quiet kid, so shy and calm and in my own head. Of course I knew about being sad. Maybe that’s the reason I saved all the things I thought were pretty.
He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, ‘O, teach me how I should forget to think!’ I, for the first time, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare.
And then we get new homes that we make for ourselves.
The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can’t get away from it. Not ever.
There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity.
If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.
There are so many things that I want so badly to tell you but I just can’t.
And I want to tell you about everything but I can’t because I couldn’t stand for you to have that look on your face all the time. I just need you to look at me and think that I’m normal. I just really need that from you.
Each time a breeze starts, I feel the air all the way through me.
My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.
When the bell rings, and lunch is over, I decide to come back here tomorrow, and the next day. I tell myself it really isn’t that bad.
Dignity is overrated. You know what trumps dignity? Kissing.
I sleep through the next day. Each time I go to the bathroom, I try not to look in the mirror. Once, I catch my reflection: it looks like I’ve been punched in both eyes.I can’t talk about the day that follows that.
This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes.
We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.
We take a last look out of the window at the night, and I send a silent wish to everyone out there for this kind of warmth.
It isn’t the happy ending that Ingrid and I have dreamed up, but it’s all a part of what I’m working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and had you close
I’m sorry I left without telling you,” she says. “I wasn’t ready. I wanted it so much, and I wasn’t ready for that.
I leaned over the sink, closer to my reflection, and stare at myself hard. I don’t know what I see. I don’t even know what I want to see.
We were nostalgic for a time that wasn’t yet over.
I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: ‘Do you think she’s straight?’ ‘Oh no. She’s scenic
…I think that people who make judgements about other people they don’t even know are shallow, and people who start rumors are shallow, and I really don’t care what shallow people say about me.
Don’t you want to kiss me?’ she asks.She smiles just a little, a hopeful, sweet smile, but buried in it is that confidence that slays me.