You have to fake the hell out of it.

I had so many unlucky things happen in a row, that I was just ecstatic to see that my shampoo & conditioner weren't all used up. I was just happy that my contacts wanted to go in my eyes the right way, and that my bangs stayed down instead of sticking up. I was happy looking the way I did, and knowing that what had happened did happen. And that I was still okay. Amazingly, I was still okay.

“The man for me is the cherry on the pie. But I’m the pie and my pie is good all by itself. Even if I don’t have a cherry.”
--Halle Berry

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

“I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.”
--Elizabeth Taylor

"It's not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
--William Shakespeare

"The answer is that you never, ever, rely on another person for your peace of mind. You have to - I don't know - you have to learn to live with yourself. You have to learn to turn back your own sheets and set a table for one without feeling pathetic. You have to be strong and confident and pleased with yourself and never give the slightest impression that you can't hack it without that certain someone. You have to fake the hell out of it."
--Armistead Maupin, 'More Tales of the City'

“Also, I noticed when I drink caffeine shit gets done but also I sound crazy.”
--Ryan Adams

"I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three."
--Elayne Boosler

"It was nice, damn it. It was fun. It was exciting. It was miserable. It was hard. It was terrifying. It was heartbreaking. It was alive. It was true. It was all there was."
--Kevin Brooks, 'Lucas'

"All I could see for the backseat of the car was a green-clad creature padding along the Stand in a shimmering haze of heat; a slight ragged figure with a mop of straw-blonde hair and a way of walking - I smile when I think of it - a way of walking that whispered secrets to the air."
--Kevin Brooks, 'Lucas'

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
--Harper Lee, 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

For some reason, a long time ago, you and I sat down and said that on this day, we would set everything aside and try to find some meaning in the chaos of the world around us.
So in spite of the people who will fight around you, the family members who'll argue, the one's who'll tell you it's all a waste of time and money, on your own or with someone else, you go out there and you find a moment. One serene, beautiful moment when the world and everything in it makes sense. It's rare. And it doesn't get handed to you on a platter. Which is why you've got an entire day to look for it.
--I Wrote This For You

Maybe you remember when we were younger, the world seemed to be a-ok. I would look outside, up to the sky and, wonder maybe on the far side of the planet, maybe there's someone just like me. Me and imaginary-you. We're a-ok. You're a-ok.

"A pessimist sees only the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides, and shrugs; an optimist doesn’t see the clouds at all- he’s walking on them."
--Leonard Louis Levinson

I thought I was the only one.

The most beautiful discovery true friends make is that they can grow separately without growing apart.

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
--C.S. Lewis

Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it.

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
--Jonathan Safran Foer

"So in the end, was it worth it? Jesus Christ. How irreparably changed my life has become. It's always the last day of summer and I've been left out in the cold with no door to get back in. I'll grant you I've had more than my share of poignant moments. Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it. Throughout my lifetime, I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now, there's almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door."
--'Blow'

“Fall in love with the process and the results will follow. You’ve got to want to act more than you want to be an actor. You’ve got to want to do whatever you want to do more than you want to be whatever you want to be, want to write more than you want to be a writer, want to heal more than you want to be a doctor, want to teach more than you want to be a teacher, want to serve more than you want to be a politician. Life is too challenging for external rewards to sustain us. The joy is in the journey.”
--Bradley Whitford

We're volleying words back and forth.

“Things are going so well. We’re volleying words back and forth. Everything she says, I have something I can say back. We’re sparking, and part of me just wants to sit back and watch. We’re clicking. Not because a part of me is fitting into a part of her. But because our words are clicking to form sentences and our sentences are clicking into each other to form dialogue and our dialogue is clicking together to form this scene from this ongoing movie that’s as comfortable as it is unrehearsed.”
--'Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist'

"I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they'd have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They'd get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I'd be through with having conversations for the rest of my life."
--J.D. Salinger

“The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is.”
--Mary Pettibone Poole

I'm nearly home.

“It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.”
--Lemony Snicket

"The island sky has its own unmistakable lights, an iridescent sheen that moves with the moods of the sea. It’s never the same, but it’s always the same, and whenever I see it I know I’m nearly home."
--Kevin Brooks, 'Lucas'

Love always wins.

“Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you. I’d been broken beyond repair.”
--Stephanie Meyer, 'New Moon'

I don’t have a fear of commitment- I have a fear of abandonment. We all screw things up, I screw things up, even, almost especially with the people I love. I get needy, I get moody, I get distant, I want to be too close, I get confused, I don’t understand... all of it. But I keep pushing because I hope in this thing, the universe, that tells me that there’s no way I’m the only person out there who wants something this bad - that if I want it, someone else out there must too. So we keep looking for each other. Whether or not we “fit in”, whether or not whatever. I’ll accept you and keep you just as much as you accept and want to keep me, because I want you.

"Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle."
"Sounds like a wrestling match," I say.
"A wrestling match?" He laughs. "Yes, you could describe life that way."
"So which side wins?" I ask.
"Which side wins?" He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.
"Love wins. Love Always Wins."
--Mitch Albom, 'Tuesdays With Morrie'

Sometimes she forgets what she is worth.

“If she’d been dumber, she’d have been happier.”
--Shelley Winters on Marilyn Monroe

“When the rain falls you just let it fall and you grin like a madman and you dance with it, because if you can make yourself happy in the rain then you’re doing pretty alright in life.”
--'Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist'

“A woman has strengths that amaze me, she can handle trouble and carry heavy burdens, she holds happiness, love and opinions, she smiles when she feels like screaming, she sings when she feels like crying, cries when shes happy, and laughs when shes afraid, her love is unconditional, there’s only one thing wrong with her and that is that sometimes she forgets what she is worth.”
--Unknown

“Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.”
--Elise Boulding

The only worse thing than being sad is for others to know that you are sad.

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others - the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would sleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Everything Is Illuminated'

I must admit you kinda bore me.

He smiles when she’s not looking. She daydreams when he’s not there.

“Maybe that’s it… with what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces.”
--'Nick & Norah Infinite Playlist'

"I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches."
--Alice Roosevelt Longworth

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it."
--'To Kill A Mockingbird'

You don’t necessarily have to be the best at what you do—there’s always someone better. Instead, be the only one who does what you do.

"When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them. Picking out all the little details you'd never stare long enough to get if she'd ever just return your gaze, this, this is your revenge."
--Chuck Palahniuk, 'Invisible Monsters'

“When women go wrong, men go right after them.”
--Mae West

"You're going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you've got to start going there. But immediately. You can't afford to lose a minute."
--J.D. Salinger

"It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddamn Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddamn cliques."
--J.D. Salinger

"There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday."
--Robert Nathan

"It's jamais vu. The French opposite of deja vu where everybody is a stranger no matter how well you think you know them."
--Chuck Palahniuk, 'Choke'

"If you're anything like me, you can receieve ten compliments and one insult. You immediately forget the compliments, while the insult plays on your mind for hours, days, sometimes years."
--Jane Green

“I looked my demons in the eyes, laid bare my chest, said, ‘Do your best to destroy me. You see, I been to hell and back so many times, I must admit you kinda bore me.’”
--Ray Lamontagne

"I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there."
--Herb Caen

The future will be better tomorrow.

"Crazy isn't being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me...amplified."
--'Girl, Interrupted'

A Pitch Too High For Human Ear

I watch people sometimes, wonder how they can walk around with the weight of what they know. Wonder if they feel like me, stumbling with lead shoes on the bottom of the ocean, swimming in a sea of the unsayable. It’s a mistake we make, thinking its words that tell us everything. It’s sound that breaks glasses, cracks windows, sends cats up trees. Bats hear more than humans, understand more noise, let alone dogs. Maybe we’re just not getting it, standing here listening for sensible speech, dying of loneliness and waiting for whatever it is. How do we know we’re not calling and calling all the time, our throats so tight with it, its too high to hear?

There are so many variations of alone.

"Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying?"
--Chuck Palahniuk, 'Invisible Monsters'

Although it's such a singular word, there are so many variations of alone. There is the alone of an empty beach at twilight. There is the alone of an empty hotel room. There is the alone of being caught in a throng of people. There is the alone of missing a particular person. And there is the alone of being with a particular person and realizing you are still alone.

“We’re so fucked. We are. We’re screwed. We’re this generation of women who are just as lonely as any other, but we’re just unwilling to settle or compromise to get ourselves out of it. So we’re all just waiting for the fucking needle-in-a-haystack guy who we’re going to love, who’s going to happen to love us, who we’re going to meet just at the time when we’re both available and living in the same city. We’re totally fucked.”
--Liz Tuccillo, 'How To Be Single'

Give me love.

He'll let a woman who becomes his doormat pay for dinner on the first couple of dates, but he wouldn't think of it with his dream girl.

Give me love. Thrill me. Surprise me. Dazzle me. Delight me. Tease me. Please me. Give me days I’ll always remember and nights that I’ll never forget. Give me everything I want and nothing I need. Give me you.

"Don't say you love somebody and then change your mind. Love isn't like picking what movie you want to watch."
--Natalie, age 9

“It’s a wonder, in fact, I’m even still clinging to this planet, far off as I am on my love balloon.”
--Katie Crouch

I’d always been secretly scared of so many things, and the months of ‘yes’ had changed me. Maybe I’d been scared of falling in love, just as I’d been scared of roller coasters and sweater vests, of leaping before I looked. From the outside I knew that I looked devil-may-care, but on the inside I cared like crazy. Part of me was always preserving myself, making sure that I didn’t get hurt, making sure that I didn’t get lost. Not today. I let go of the last things I’d been clinging to. I was ready for love to come to me.

She is you.

     If you’re reading this, it means I actually whipped up the courage to mail it, so good for me.
     You don’t know me very well but if you get me started, I have a tendency to go on and on about how hard the writing is for me. This, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. There’s no other easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it. I met someone. It was an accident. I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t on the make. It was a perfect storm. She said one thing, I said another. Next thing I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation. Now there’s this feeling in my gut, that she might be the one. She’s completely nuts, in a way that makes me smile. Highly neurotic. A great deal of maintenance required.
     She is you.
     That’s the good news. The bad is that I don’t know how to be with you right now, and it scares the shit out of me. Because I have a feeling that if I’m not with you right now, we’ll get lost out there. It’s a big bad world full of twists and turns and people have a way of blinking and missing the moment. A moment that could have changed everything. I don’t know what's going on with us, and I can’t tell you why you should waste a leap of faith on the likes of me, but damn you smell good, like home. And you make excellent coffee.

My boobs are amazing.

All quotes by author Sarah Dessen

"I'd been convinced I was on the outside, but really, I'd always been within arm's reach. All I had to do was ask, and I, too, would be easily brought back, surrounded and immersed, finding myself safe, somewhere in between."
--'Just Listen'

"Next thing you know she'll be on the bus and selling T-shirts in the parking lot, showing off her boobs to get in the stage door."
"At least she has boobs to show," Jess said.
"I have boobs," Chloe said, pointing to her chest. "Just because they're not weighing me down doesn't mean they're not substantial."
"Okay, B cup," Jess said, taking a sip of her drink.
"I have boobs!" Chloe said again, a bit too loudly. "My boobs are great, goddammit. You know that? They're fantastic! My boobs are amazing."

"If this was my forever, I wouldn't want to spend it here."
--'The Truth About Forever'

"But it's strange, when you've always been told something is true, like the moon will come back. You need proof. And while you wait, you feel the entire balance of your world just tipping. It's crazy. But when it's over, and it does come back, that's the best, because it's all you want, everything narrows to just that. It's this great rush, like for that one second everything's okay with the world again. It's amazing."
--'Keeping The Moon'

"Plus the fact that the window I was now facing opened up to the part of the lot where people picked up their brand-new cars. Every few minutes, one of the salesmen would walk someone right to the center of the window, hand them their shiny new keys, and then smile benevolently as they drove off into the sunset, just like in the commercials. What a bunch of shit."

"If you try anything, if you try to lose weight, or to improve yourself, or to love, or to make the world a better place, you have already achieved something wonderful, before you even begin. Forget failure. If things don't work out the way you want, hold your head up high and be proud. And try again. And again. And again!"
--'Keeping The Moon'

"This is exactly what I wanted, as commitments had never really been my thing. And it wasn't like it was hard, either. The only trick was never giving more than you were willing to lose."
--'Lock And Key'

"'Okay,' he said. He took a breath. 'What would you do, if you could do anything?' I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. 'This,' I said. And then I kissed him. Kissed him. There, in the middle of the street, as the world went on around us. Behind me, I knew Jason was still waiting for an explanation, my sister was still lecturing, and that angel still had her eyes skyward, waiting to fly. As for me, I was just trying to get it right, whatever that meant. But now I finally felt I was on my way. Everyone had a forever, but given a choice, this would be mine. The one that began in this moment, with Wes, in a kiss that took my breath away, then gave it back -- leaving me astounded, amazed, and most of all, alive."

"Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded."
--Dreamland

"My mother has always been the point I calibrated myself against. In knowing where she was, I could always locate myself, as well."
--'Lock And Key'

"You can't just plan a moment when things get back on track, just as you can't plan the moment you lose your way in the first place."
--'Someone Like You'

Watch me fall.

All quotes by author Jodi Picoult

"There's always going to be bad stuff out there. But here's the amazing thing - light trumps darkness, every time. You stick a candle into the dark, but you can't stick the dark into the light."
--'Change Of Heart'

"My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her."

"I'm lonely. Why do you think I had to learn to act so independent? I also get mad too quickly, and I hog the covers, and my second toe is longer than my big one. My hair has it's own zip code. Plus, I get certifiably crazy when I've got PMS. You don't love someone because they're perfect. You love them in spite of the fact that they're not."
--'My Sister's Keeper'

"How could he convey to someone who'd never even met her the way she always smelled like rain, or how his stomach knotted up every time he saw her shake loose her hair from its braid? How could he describe how it felt when she finished his sentences, turned the mug they were sharing so that her mouth landed where his had been? How did he explain the way they could be in a locker room, or underwater, or in the piney woods of Maine, but as long as she was with him, he was at home?"
--'The Pact'

"Everyone thinks you make mistakes when you're young. But I don't think we make any fewer when we're grown up."

"I sometimes wonder if it is just me, or if there are other women who figure out where they are supposed to be by going nowhere."
--'My Sister's Keeper'

"What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars."
--'My Sister's Keeper'

"You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed - the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience."
--'Perfect Match'

"Love is not and equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where your headed."

"When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like."
--'Nineteen Minutes'

"Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case – feared might come to pass, passed by instead."
--Jodi Picoult

'I am Alice in Wonderland', Josie thought. 'Watch me fall.'

"She kept saying she wanted to keep things exactly the way they were, and that she wished she could stop everything from changing. She got really nervous, like, talking about the future. She once told me that she could see herself now, and she could also see the kind of life she wanted to have - kids, husband, suburbs, you know - but she couldn't figure out how to get from point A to point B."
--'The Pact'

"Traveling is all very well and good as long as you knew there is a place or person you can call home."
--'Mercy'

"Love is supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it falls apart at the details. It can't save a single person."
--'Nineteen Minutes'

Better Beats Best

The prettiest girl in the world lets me bite her cheeks when she blushes. The coolest girl in the world lets me update on her laptop while she’s sleeping. The warmest girl in the world holds me against her when I demand it, but not before laughing and saying she doesn’t have to do a damn thing I tell her to. The sweetest girl in the world leaves a five dollar tip to the waiter when we eat. The funniest girl in the world locks herself in the cabinet with the ironing board. The girl with best taste always tells me to pick what songs we listen to because I have the best taste in music. The girl with the best boy is the one who is with me because I will never let her down.

Maybe there's a man under her skirt.

All quotes from 'The Bride Stripped Bare' by Nikki Gemmell

No one though, has any idea of the churn of a secret life. Your desire to crash catastrophe into your world is like a tugging at your skirt. But only sometimes, and then it’s gone. With the offer of a bath, or a cup of tea, or the dishes done.

She was a stranger to me in many ways and yet the person closest to me.

You're comfortable with him, you don't have to act too much, you can be, almost, yourself. No one else is allowed so close.

He's the only man you're attracted to whom you can talk to without a fear of silence, like an empty highway, right through the middle of the conversation.

You push his face toward you. He's surprised at the boldness, he wants his face back but you hold him firm for you're remembering walking down the aisle and looking ahead to him and you heart swelling with love like an old dried sponge that's been dropped into a bath. When your husband enfolds you in his arms it's a haven, a harbour, to rest from all the toss of the world. It's what you've always wanted, you have to admit, the place of refuge, the cliche.

There were the endless birthday nights and New Year's Eves of just you in your bed and no one else. There was the welling up at weddings, the glittery eye-prick, when all the couples would get up and dance. Sometimes it felt like your heart was crazed with cracks like your grandmother's old saucers. Sometimes the sight of a Saturday afternoon couple laughing in the park would splinter it completely. Young couples who'd been together for many years were intriguing, hateful, remote. What was their secret? You'd reached the stage where you couldn't imagine ever being in a loving partnership.

But there was a moment of invisibility when you tried on the wedding dress, as if you were disappearing into that swathe of ivory and tulle, being wiped away. It was only fleeting and it was worth it, of course, not to have the prickle behind the eyes of those Saturday afternoon couples again, the heart-crack.

He forced you to look, right at the start, he taught you to get close. He likes to direct your life, to guide it. You let him think he is.

Your dear, restless, vivid-hearted friend. Sometimes you feel a sharp envy at the sensuality of her home, all candles and wood and stone, her fluid working hours, weekly massages, Kelly bags. But you remind yourself that she isn't happy and probably never will be and it's a comfort, that. For no matter how much she achieves and acquires and out-dazzles everyone else, she never seems content. She's taught you that people who shine more lavishly than everyone else seem to be penalized by discontent, as if they're being punished for craving a brighter life. I've been knocked down so many times I can't remember the number plates, she said once.

All the noise of her personality is a mask and when it slips off, on the rare occasion, the vulnerability riddled through her is always a shock.

You lift your head to the low ochre-colored buildings around you and break from his grasp and swirl, gulping the sights, for you feel as if all of life's in this place.

You suspect you attract extreme people like her because you're so stable. She described you once as eerily content and for some this means unforgivably beige but for others you're an anchor, always there if needed, even on Sunday evenings, and birthdays, and Christmas Day.

The chief causes of the weak health of women are silence, stillness and stays, therefore learn to sing and dance, and never wear tight stays

Dance away with all your might

Every girl can dance and should learn to do it well

It is absolutely necessary to wash the armpits and hips every day

Putting damp sheets on a bed is a little short of murder

There are few who willfully injure their health, but many thoughtlessly destroy it

It cannot be rational enjoyment to go where you would not like to have your truest and best friend go with you

Every womanly woman, who truly realizes her mission, desires to be a pleasant object of vision for her fellow creatures

Some use pillows stuffed with hops, but the best preparation for sleep is honest hard work and a good conscience

"As it has been said: Love and a cough cannot be concealed. Even a small cough. Even a small love."
--Anne Sexton

You're not bored or angry but stopped; nothing engages, nothing interests, you're at a loss over what to do next, with the next hour and with all the days of your life.

It's the long, long nights that defeat you. When you are blown out like a candle.

You're good at cutting people off, it's always been a skill, a small one but effective; making things neat, moving on.

You always give in, have done it your whole life; where does it come from, this stubborn need to be liked?

You've never been voracious about partying. You're too good at blushing, and awkward silences, and saying something jarring and wrong. You're not very accomplished with big groups, have always been more comfortable with one on one, the small magic you can work is always dissipated in a crowd.

You redden in front of anyone you're attracted to and have never grown out of it, you body often lets you down.

You hate the feeling of entrapment you can get at parties, hate being reliant upon someone else for your means of escape.

And what did you do? You chose to sit, with your thudding heart. Nothing else. For that's always been your way, the retreat, the silence, and it's only later, much later, that you find the words you should have said. But they're never uttered in time, you're too careful of hurting even when hurt, and too cowardly, yes that.

A thrill plumes through you when couples split, a feeling that order's restored, that it's the way we're all meant to be, alone.

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in a double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife.

Love is attention and you're not getting any.

You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.

Maybe she's blissfully happy, darling. Maybe there's a man under her skirt.

I want to be the hand in the small of your back pushing you forward.

♥

Basically it would just be neat to be in a relationship with someone who is as intensely crazy as I am. Who just becomes enamored with people. And the tiny details. I swoon over people in the most ridiculous way. I like all of the tiny details of people. When I am an ass over someone, I want to go back in time and punch people in the face for them. I want to run out to the store and get them ice cream at four in the morning because they can’t go to sleep and they feel like something rich. And when I get back to your place with a half gallon of ice cream and your ass is passed out with your mouth open, catching flies, I want to cover you up with blankets and make sure you have enough pillows. I’ll throw that ice cream in your freezer and go to sleep. I want you to tell me a story. I want to make this list of why I think you’re a neat human being.

Loving is fine.

“I’ve been with a lot of girls. Some worth the trouble. Some not. Every now and again there’s one. One you name dumb stars with.”
--'Lost'

Just you being there, hugging me, listening to my deepest secret and not judging me meant the world. I love you more than anything. Even though you’re the laziest person I know and sometimes I really want to punch you.

Loving is fine if you have plenty of time for walking on stilts at the edge of your mind.

I don't love me. And that's how I understand why you don't either.

"There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing."
--Francois La Rochefoucauld

I can’t really offer you much. But I can offer you that empty spot of carpet right next to me. I can offer you late nights, of you and I sitting together. I can share with you my mind, and my words, and my music, and maybe it’ll move you, like you move me.