I used to look at her feet and think she always picked the perfect nail polish. Staring at her jaw line and her eyelashes she was exactly how I always pictured my girlfriend to look. Flipping her hair to one side, her mouth half open she looked up from her book, paused and said with a snip, "what!?!" "I'm just looking." I countered, startled I was caught in mid-lurker gaze. Truth is, I wanted her to notice because I was too much of a pussy to look at her head on for any other reason. This is the moment that I remember. The moment that was the most intense. The moment both of our faces looked at each other head on. The drives, the movies, the sex…you never realize just how rare it is to have two people look directly at each another. I took advantage of the moment; I breathed in her exhale and felt the swoon they speak of in books. Like your hair is slowly melting across your forehead causing your eyes to close and your chin to lift. God himself couldn't envision anything so pristine. She was made for forehead kisses. She was made to accentuate reflected light. She was made to float when she walked. She was made good. Good enough to love someone who didn't deserve her love. She was made for me.

Things keep getting born in me.

THE BRIDE

I wonder if ever

I will be a bride

with a white lace gown,

standing in front of everyone

looking beautiful

because someone

loves me

that much.

There’s something about being wrong that’s important in life. It teaches you to reanalyze, to look at something from a new angle, to get the foot out of your mouth. Being wrong is one of the most profound experiences a person can have.

If you find you’re lacking anything, let me know and I’ll show you how to live without it.

"The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life."

--Jessica Hische

"My secret is being not terrible at a lot of things."

--Moby

“to love life, to love it even

when you have no stomach for it

and everything you’ve held dear

crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,

your throat filled with the silt of it.

When grief sits with you, its tropical heat

thickening the air, heavy as water

more fit for gills than lungs;

when grief weights you like your own flesh

only more of it, an obesity of grief,

you think, How can a body withstand this?

Then you hold life like a face

between your palms, a plain face,

no charming smile, no violet eyes,

and you say, yes, I will take you

I will love you, again.”

--Ellen Bass

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world’s greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.”

--Saul Williams, Said the shotgun to the Head

"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, ‘So what.’ That’s one of my favorite things to say. ‘So what.’"

--Andy Warhol

"I want to keep my soul fertile for changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it’s time for them to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not read the same page recurrently."

--Donald Miller

I just want someone to think I’m special, to see me apart from the crowd, as worth knowing and loving. I don’t care if that sounds weak. I like independence, but sometimes it feels like a defense mechanism.

Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you.

You build your world around someone, and then what happens when he disappears? Where do you go - into pieces, into atoms, into the arms of another man? You go shopping, you cook dinner, you work odd hours, you make love to someone else on June nights. But you’re not really there, you’re someplace else where there is blue sky and a road you don’t recognize. If you squint your eyes, you think you see him, in the shadows, beyond the trees. You always imagine that you see him, but he’s never there. It’s only his spirit, that’s what’s there beneath the bed when you kiss your husband, there when you send your daughter off to school. It’s in your coffee cup, your bathwater, your tears. Unfinished business always comes back to haunt you, and a man who swears he’ll love you forever isn’t finished with you until he’s done.

it is enough to be taken care of by myself.

All quotes from StoryPeople

“Destiny? there’s only your time & then there’s not your time, she said. All the rest is made up to keep you busy”

“she’s a self-playing accordian & even when she’s asleep, her quiet breathing goes a-one & a-two”

“this is a dress-up box for the future & it’s filled with stuff like courage & love & play because they’re the only things that are any use at all when you get Right down to it.”

“knows most everything worth knowing but has stayed close to home just in case that changes”

“There are days I drop words of comfort on myself like falling rain & remember it is enough to be taken care of by myself.”

“getting ready to jump as high as she can just because there’s only so long you can sit politely & listen while people talk about any old stuff that comes into their heads”

"hoping there'll be time for a future he likes, but pretty well settled on the future he's got already."

"If I ran the world, he told me, I'd pretty much leave it alone & spend my time reading & I'd advise other people to do the same. Which is why I'll probably never run the world, he said"

"This is a special bike that's not very good at listening to excuses, so it takes you exactly where you really want to go & if you kick & scream it makes you pedal harder & go up steeper hills until you're too out of breath to complain & after awhile, if you're lucky, you start to see that it doesn't really matter if you laugh or cry, because it just wants to ride like the wind"

I need you to listen for just a second. I don't care if you only shop at thrift stores. And I don't care if you read nothing but classic novels. It is not important to me whether you are thirteen or thirty four, foreign or native, thin or overweight. I will not judge you. It does not matter to me what kind of haircut you have, what sort of statement you're making while you lead a vegan lifestyle or if you love steaks and fried eggs. Love sex, hate drugs, do cocaine, listen to Simon and Garfunkel. I'm not interested in how superior your taste in underground music is. I couldn't care less if you're wearing Urban Outfitters jeans, thrifted shoes, or a Hollister polo. It is not important to me whether you are a writer, a dreamer, a painter, a gas station clerk, or if you're living off food stamps. I don't give a shit if you're a hippie, a half-assed hipster, an atheist, a devoted Christian, wealthy, dirty, Catholic, homeless, Jewish, Buddhist, a smoker, a drinker, clean, or shy, I will not judge you. It doesn't matter to me how extensive your vocabulary may be, which independent films you've seen, what books you've read, how how your IQ is. I will still open the door for you. I promise. And I will let you sit near me if another seat is unavailable. Even if I disagree with some of your ideas. I will fucking respect you. I will offer you some common decency. And not because it's right, and not because you deserve it, but because that is what makes sense to me. This is what has always made sense to me. I'm a shadow. Neurotic, opaque, and drunk with fascination. I'm your friend. And you don't have to impress me. Because I'm not here to impress you.

And I thought maybe I’d never seen two boys jump like this, just pogo with fervor and heart and ten year old delight through two dozen songs - crying out those lyrics like they wrote them last night. Like they’d finally found how to say what they’d always meant. Just in time.

And this mean thought occurred to me: What if life is too brief to love people who can’t say what they mean.

And I nodded my head forward and back, kept their southern time with my knee. Brushed at the heat creeping up out of my dress and scarf and clinging unruly hair strands to my forehead, to the corner of my mouth. Wondered where all our words go. What happens to the old I love you’s, I want someone to tell me. Are they retracted by breakups or is there some universal half life? Do they drift by Borneo and Omsk, relevance dissipating by the week? Is there some rural refuse heap for words no longer felt?

And what of the people you love who can’t love you back. What of the declarations sent to guarded ears and formal hearts never quite ready to choose you back. Are they air off windshields? Letters coldly returned to sender. Old lovers ducked away from before eye contact in dark bars with new dates. Avoided. Maybe I’d thought they were kept in queue. For the right time. Maybe I’d never considered that they could just fall to feet. Dust back to dust.

I’ve been thinking about the people who want to love each other in this world. And maybe there are many. Maybe there are too many to stay so loyal, so in love with possibility that never seems interested in hatching. for you.

I want these burned down, heart broken, offered up words. These words of merit and trying. Again. Or no song at all.

Today should always be enough.

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, something real?"

–-Ray Bradbury

Life is about feeling someone pushing you from behind and realizing it’s you.

"When the tides of life turn against you and the current upsets your boat, don’t waste those tears on what might have been, just lie on your back and float."

--Edward Norton

Today is enough. You don’t need forever and always. You don’t need promises of days that never come. Today is enough, you don’t need the words that cannot possibly be true. Nothing is forever. Nothing lasts for always. Today should always be enough.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

"I want people to know that almost everything that concerns them in their daily lives is of no consequence whatsoever. Nothing and nobody is really important, so people, realising that, should get on with their lives, go mad, take their clothes off, jump in the canal, jump into one of those supermarket trolleys, race ‘round the supermarket and steal Mars bars and, y’know, kiss kittens and sit on the back of bread vans. Whatever makes people happy they should just do it, ‘cos time is a mere scratch and life is nothing."

--Morrissey

“There is a quiet wind voice inside of me. It’s the same voice inside of you. Delicate and persevering, it led us towards each other. Across desert sand, traffic noise, solitary sky. I found your little house by the sea, and I never wanted to leave…”

--Monique Duval in the persistence of yellow

I don’t care what the world knows about me just so long as my mother never finds out.

Hi, I’m trying to figure out where to begin. I am 67 and have a grand daughter that likes this site. She doesn’t believe in love though. Well, I have been married to my wife since we were eighteen, but really time doesn’t matter because what we have is eternal and I discover more things that are beautiful about her everyday. I like the way her wrists are shaped, her hair is almost nearly askew in her bun, and how she breaths. I just want to feel her heartbeat and laugh at the ridiculous meals she prepares. We’re not perfect. Hell, no relationship is perfect. But, we’re a bunch of haphazard pieces that make something so amazing. I would want to be with her everyday, regardless. Just believe in initiation. Believe in yourself. Believe in the creases that form around the person you love’s mouth as they smile. And thanks, Laurie, for teaching me how to love. You’re my forever crush.

— Ray, a grandfather that knows love exists.