VI

~

you are going to die.

by buddhist meditation used to intensify happiness.

~

when they say don’t i know you?
say no.
when they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
then reply.
if they say we should get together
say why?
it’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
you’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
trees. the monastery bell at twilight.
tell them you have a new project.
it will never be finished.
when someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
when someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
you will never catch up.
walk around feeling like a leaf.
know you could tumble any second.
then decide what to do with your time.

by naomi shihab nye, “the art of disappearing”

~

i am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. also, of endless books.

by c.s. lewis

~

you know a moment is important when it is making your mind go numb with beauty.

by friedrich nietzsche, from notebooks

~

oscar wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it - that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. there is a truth to that. we are not nouns, we are verbs. i am not a thing - an actor, a writer - i am a person who does things - i write, i act - and i never know what i am going to do next. i think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

by stephen fry

~

touch. it is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. by touch we are betrayed and betray others… an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands… hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. when one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.

by wallace stegner, angle of repose (1972)

~

sports fans have caused actual riots, but people still take sports seriously. boy band fans scream at concerts, and suddenly they’re “a spectacle of the natural world.” things that are made for women, particularly young women, are automatically given less respect. girls who get interested interested in comic books or video games or science fiction get called “fake geek girls.” 

magazines and television and advertisements tell teenage girls that they should like certain things, and then other magazines tell girls that they’re stupid for liking those things. then magazines publish articles and tv shows run specials wondering why teenage girls don’t have better self esteem, like they didn’t make it that way.

there’s nothing wrong with teenage girls being enthusiastic about boy bands or (heaven forbid) having sexual feelings about the boys in boy bands. there is something wrong with the way that other people react to teenage girls and their interests.

by boy bands and sexism: can we stop hating teenage girls?

~

so many stars
and still we starve.

by tasos leivaditis, from a manual for euthanasia (1970)

~

when people long to be something else, it speaks to this basic human condition of being earth-bound and longing for transcendence. there’s that platonic sense: you were once whole, and now you are not whole anymore; you long for that wholeness you once had. you fell from the stars and you want to return there. or just your plain old catholic thing of wanting to return to god. whatever name you put on it, there’s this longing to return to some sense of wholeness that you came from and that you’ll go back to someday.

by carolyn turgeon

~

a bad bitch never hates on another bad bitch. if you see a bad bitch and you know you’re a bad bitch, why hate? send her a chanel bag.

by foxy brown

~

there it goes again. that heavy feeling in your chest when you don’t feel any desire to speak or move. all you want to do is close your eyes and sleep, because the process of being broken is incredibly exhausting. you attempt your best to make your days fulfilling, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to connect to anyone or anything.

~

i was always sweet, at first. oh, it’s so easy to be sweet to people before you love them.

by dorothy parker, collected stories

~

i came to a realisation last night. i don’t trust men. an individual man i can trust. i am married to one, most of my best friends are men. i trust them. but men, collectively, as a sex, as a group? no, i don’t trust them. i get twitchy if there is a man i don’t know behind me in the streets for more than a few minutes. and it’s not because of the ‘big things’: the rape, the abuse, the murder (tho i have seen plenty of these up close and personal, as well as in the news). no, it’s the little things. the constant little things. the street harassment. the guy that grabbed me in a pub. and the other one. and the other one. the sexist ‘jokes’. the dehumanising comments. all of it builds to a background noise of ‘men are a threat’.
and then i thought, why? why is it the little things and not the big things that built up. it’s because we are taught treat male violence against women the same way we treat war. each is a discrete event, unconnected to that which went before, or came after. all designed to stop us noticing that, on paper at least, men have been fighting a war against us continuously for ever. we have the casualty figures to prove it. figures that show that women are more at risk from the men in their lives (and the men they don’t know) than almost anything else.
so yeah. i don’t trust men. and it’s not just the little things anymore. i see the pattern. i see the victims. i see the war.

by source: chalk another one up to the man haters, or, how i learned to stop worrying and notice the sex wars 


~

you taste like the last day of summer.

by  ryan osterman

~

the thing is you have to fight the whole time. you can’t stop. otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.

by alexander maksik, you deserve nothing

~

the dreamer isn’t lonely. not when, like van gogh, he has reached that level of spiritual perfection. the dreamer, the artist, the saint, the monk on the snow levels of tibet, are frightfully and dynamically and electrically unlonely people…this man isn’t lonely. he is simply drunk with colours, as lonely, yes exactly, as a bee or moth on the cup of whatever it happens to be, colour; trumpet flower, coral berry, wax-berry, gold-frilled petal of the evening primrose, green where a stem grows silver or where another green turns moss-green or under-apple-leaf green; these were things that for him had their exact counterpart on that miraculous palette.

by h.d., vincent van gogh

~

the highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgement.

by jiddu krishnamurti

~

i didn’t want to be anything and i was certainly succeeding.

by charles bukowski, ham on rye. 

~

it’s not ‘clever lonely’ (like morrissey) or ‘interesting lonely’ (like radiohead); it’s ‘lonely lonely,’ like the way it feels when you’re being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.

by chuck klosterman

~

you.
not wanting me.
was
the beginning of me.
wanting myself.
thank you.

by the hurt, nayyirah waheed

~

i will love you if i never see you again, and i will love you if i see you every tuesday.

by lemony snicket 

~

the generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: i know i’m not being clear, exactly, but don’t you kind of feel what i’m feeling?

by george saunders 

~

people are—nothing more.

by virginia woolf, from the voyage ou

~

my brain and this world don’t fit each other.

~

you know a moment is important when it is making your mind go numb with beauty.

by friedrich nietzsche, from notebooks

~

nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, i tell you. in fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not others, it is your own mind.

by sri sri ravi shankar

~

the other day i slept. it was great.

by thom yorke, after being asked “what’s the most fun you had this week?”, 1994

~

i remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; i began to bawl because i had everything i wanted and knew i would never be so happy again.

by f. scott fitzgerald

~

i treat myself like i would my daughter. i brush her hair, wash her laundry, tuck her in goodnight. most importantly, i feed her. i do not punish her. i do not berate her, leave tears staining her face. i do not leave her alone. i know she deserves more.
i know i deserve more.

by michelle k., i know i deserve more.

~

writers end up writing about their obsessions. things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

by natalie goldberg

~

so, what’s wrong with the generalization that more sex = liberation? it locates sexual liberation in an experience of white heterosexual femininity. it does not take into the account the different experiences of racialization and sexualization of women, queer and trans people of color. for example, while, straight, middle-class women have been stereotyped as pure, asexual virgins, while women of color have been hypersexualized as exotic, erotic beings (see: hottentot, harem girl, lotus blossom, fiery latina, squaw, etc.) for racialized people, adopting a sex-positive attitude does not “liberate” them of such stereotypes, in fact, it fuels them further. in addition, the framework of sex-positivity does not offer a critique of capitalism and the way our sexualities are commodified and exploited, preventing the “free expression” of sex, in the favorite words of sex-positive feminists. sex-positivity is also ahistorical; it does not take into account the ways attitudes about sex are related to histories of colonialism, especially the colonial imposition of gender and sexual norms. none of this is a particularly new way of thinking by the way, many feminists of color have critiqued sex-positivity for similar reasons.

~

i was so sorry that
i would never possess
anything good;
that nothing good
would ever
belong to me.
not because
i was always
poor in dollars
but because
i was poor
at expressing myself
one-on-one.
i was as yellow as the sun
perhaps
but also as warm and as true
as the sun
somewhere there inside me
but nobody would ever find it.

by charles bukowski, from rimbaud be damned

~

if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him

by f. scott fitzgerald

~

absence, the highest form of presence.

by james joyc

~

often, it’s not about becoming a new person, but becoming the person you were meant to be, and already are, but don’t know how to be.

by heath l. buckmaster, box of hair: a fairy tale

…

~

gazing up into the darkness i saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

by james joyce, araby

~

i used to imagine adventures for myself, i invented a life, so that i could at least exist somehow.

by fyodor dostoyevsky

~

i am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. also, of endless books.

by c.s. lewis

~

you are well within your rights to stand up, interrupt everyone around you and say ‘this is not who i am. this is not what i want. i’m sorry, but you’ve mistaken me for somebody else.’

by iain thomas

~

enlightenment is to finding that there is nothing to find.

by osho

~

if you’re gonna bail, bail early. this applies to relationships, college classes, and sledding,

by advice from my high school science teacher, mr. miller

~

three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day i die.

by françois truffaut. 

~

i told miyazaki i love the “gratuitous motion” in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.
"we have a word for that in japanese," he said. "it’s called ma. emptiness. it’s there intentionally.”
is that like the “pillow words” that separate phrases in japanese poetry?
"i don’t think it’s like the pillow word." he clapped his hands three or four times. "the time in between my clapping is ma. if you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. if you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.

by

rogert ebert, on hayao miyazaki

~

i want [female characters] to be allowed to be weak and strong and happy and sad – human, basically. the fallacy in hollywood is that if you’re making a ‘feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. that’s not feminist, that’s macho. a movie about a weak, vulnerable woman can be feminist if it shows a real person that we can empathize with.

by natalie portman, laying down a truth bomb about female characters 

~

you want to be understood by the sophisticated few, but you have to be more loud somehow, otherwise your message doesn’t go through.

by miuccia prada

~

is the scene always visual? it can be aural, the frame can be linguistic: i can fall in love with a sentence spoken to me: and not only because it says something which manages to touch my desire, but because of its syntactical turn (framing), which will inhabit me like a memory.

by

roland barthes; a lover’s discourse

~

the whole point is that my compass lacks a needle, no one direction is correct, no one place is home.

by rakishi, “so goes the smoke” cir. 1950. 

~

everyone’s chest
is a living room wall
with awkwardly placed photographs
hiding fist-shaped holes.

by andrea gibson, “class”

~

it is so beautiful to have no attachments!
i am solitary as grass. what is it i miss?
shall i ever find it, whatever it is?

by sylvia plath, “three women” 

~

"We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depth of the abyss. 
Let us then seek neither assurance nor stability…"

- Pascal, Pensées 

~

stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. the world does not deliver meaning to you. you have to make it meaningful… and decide what you want and need and must do. it’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. but that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. finding an identity is easy. it’s the easy way out.

by zadie smith

~

i was starting to recover. but then you looked at me again.

~

can i be both your misty,dark october and the warmth of your pot of tea?

~

i felt dreadfully inadequate. the trouble was, i had been inadequate all along, i simply hadn’t thought about it.

by sylvia plath

~

if i ever let you down, it’s not because i don’t love you. it’s because i don’t love myself.

by william chapman

~

yesterday, i spent 60 dollars on groceries,
took the bus home,
carried both bags with two good arms back to my studio apartment
and cooked myself dinner.
you and i may have different definitions of a good day.
this week, i paid my rent and my credit card bill,
worked 60 hours between my two jobs,
only saw the sun on my cigarette breaks
and slept like a rock.
flossed in the morning,
locked my door,
and remembered to buy eggs.
my mother is proud of me.
it is not the kind of pride she brags about at the golf course.
she doesn’t combat topics like, ”my daughter got into yale”
with, ”oh yeah, my daughter remembered to buy eggs”
but she is proud.
see, she remembers what came before this.
the weeks where i forgot how to use my muscles,
how i would stay as silent as a thick fog for weeks.
she thought each phone call from an unknown number was the notice of my suicide.
these were the bad days.
my life was a gift that i wanted to return.
my head was a house of leaking faucets and burnt-out lightbulbs.
depression, is a good lover.
so attentive; has this innate way of making everything about you.
and it is easy to forget that your bedroom is not the world,
that the dark shadows your pain casts is not mood-lighting.
it is easier to stay in this abusive relationship than fix the problems it has created.
today, i slept in until 10,
cleaned every dish i own,
fought with the bank,
took care of paperwork.
you and i might have different definitions of adulthood.
i don’t work for salary, i didn’t graduate from college,
but i don’t speak for others anymore,
and i don’t regret anything i can’t genuinely apologize for.
and my mother is proud of me.
i burned down a house of depression,
i painted over murals of greyscale,
and it was hard to rewrite my life into one i wanted to live
but today, i want to live.
i didn’t salivate over sharp knives,
or envy the boy who tossed himself off the brooklyn bridge.
i just cleaned my bathroom,
did the laundry,
called my brother.
told him, “it was a good day.

by

kait rokowski (a good day)

~

i scrounge for change. i bring my own travel mug

to school because it’s cheaper that way. i start books

but do not finish them. i think about love obsessively.

everything i do reminds me of my grandfather.

my grandmother visits and talks to me about god,

wants me to believe, but i do not have that kind of faith.

i only believe in the easy things, like red lipstick

and coffee before noon and writing essays in pen.

i make my mind up about boys and then i unmake it,

compare us to continental drift, two ships passing.

i hit the snooze button too often. write disposable

poems on napkins and old homework, try to discipline

myself when it comes to removing my makeup

before bed. i am trying to understand men better,

cut them some slack, write about them less. i dream

about oceans and mountains and wolves. i do not

always love myself. i do not always forgive myself.

i write apology letters and do not send them. usually,

i do not mean it when i tell someone “goodbye.”

by kristina haynes, “self-portrait at twenty-one” 

~

art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth

by pablo picasso

~

…the thing about literature and music. you use it as a way of defining yourself. you use it as an extension of your character. somebody else’s words writing your thoughts. and i think everybody who relates to music is kind of isolated. it’s lonely. everyone who uses the creative side of their brain is that much removed from reality. they are looking for answers wherever they can find them.

by laura marling

~

here’s to me, and the twenty years it took me to be able to say that.

by macaulay culkin, junior

~

listen,
when i found there was no safety
in my father’s house
i knew there was none anywhere.
you are right about this,
how i nurtured my work
not my self, how i left the girl
wallowing in her own shame
and took on the flesh of my mother.
but listen,
the girl is rising in me,
not willing to be left to
the silent fingers in the dark,
and you are right,
she is asking for more than
most men are able to give,
but she means to have what she
has earned,
sweet sighs, safe houses,
hand she can trust.

by lucille clifton — “to my friend, jerina”

~

but i feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.

by barry webster, the sound of all flesh

~

no matter how you feel… get up. dress up. show up. and never give up.

by unknown 

~

what a strange day
when i found out
what i was chasing
wasn’t running.

by shira e

~

will i be something?
am i something?

and the answer comes:

you already are.

you always were.

and you still have time to be.

by anis mojgani 

~

will i be something?
am i something?

and the answer comes:

you already are.

you always were.

and you still have time to be.

by anis mojgani 

~

there is a classic moment in the sun also rises when someone asks mike campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘gradually and then suddenly.’ when someone asks how i lost my mind, that is all i can say too.

by elizabeth wurtze

~

the more i study religions the more i am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.

by richard burton

~

i know i am a flower, too. but still, what is it to be a dandelion in a vase full of roses?

~

why do they call me misanthrope? because they hate me, not i them.

by lord byron, “don juan”

~

it depends entirely on me
what i look at, where i am
and what i do to my soul.

by jonas mekas

~

these days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘isn’t it terrible about nixon getting elected?’ ‘did you hear about the earthquake in peru?’ and you’re supposed to have all the answers. but when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘what is bugging you, mister? why can’t you make it with your wife? why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ the answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. in this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. but nobody’s really laughing. it’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. translation: ‘i am here and i don’t know why.’

by john cassavetes

~

it’s a very greek idea, and a very profound one. beauty is terror. whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. and what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? to throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? euripides speaks of the maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, “more like deer than human beings.” to be absolutely free! one is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. but how glorious to release them in a single burst! to sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! these are powerful mysteries. the bellowing of bulls. springs of honey bubbling from the ground. if we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let god consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. then spit us out reborn.

by the secret history

~

when i sit near you, my hands suddenly become alien things and i don’t know where to put them or what they usually do, like this is the first time i’ve ever had hands and maybe they go in my pockets and maybe they don’t.

by iain s. thomas, i wrote this for you

~

almost. it’s a big word for me. i feel it everywhere. almost home. almost happy. almost changed. almost, but not quite. not yet. soon, maybe.

by joan bauer

~

why is it always the woman who has to see past the beast in the man? why does she always have to clean his wounds, even after he has damaged her beyond repair? why is it always the man who is worthy of forgiveness for being a monster?
i want to see the beast in the beauty.
the half smile, half snarl. the unapologetic anger. i would like to see the man forgive the monster. to see her, blood and all, and love her anyway.

by beauty and the beast | caitlyn s.

~

do you remember the way the girls
would call out “love you!”
conveniently leaving out the “i”
as if they didn’t want to commit
to their own declarations.

and i agree that the “i” is a pretty heavy concept.

by david berman, “self portrait at 28”

~

someone, i tell you, in another time will remember us.

by -sappho (630-612 bce to approx. 570 bce), greek lyric poet from the island of lesbos 

by six word story #5 by absentions

~

who i am comes in waves.

by six word story #5 by absentions

~

just let go. let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.

by caroline myss

~

do you take pride in your hurt? does it make you seem large and tragic? …well, think about it. maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

by john steinbeck, east of eden 

~

if your work is so smart that only smart people get it, it’s not that smart.

by chris rock

~

charm is getting the answer yes without having asked any question.

by albert camus, you dog, you

~

a lot of people have taste but, they don’t have the daring to be creative. here we are in an age of the cookie-cutter sameness. there are few that are rarities.

by bill cunningham (bill cunningham new york, 2010 film)

~

he was pointing at the moon, but i was looking at his hand.

by richard siken, from “anyway” 

~

what do ruined people do? weird shit. this seems to be the consensus of psychoanalysts as far back as freud and jung; the traumatized self creates, out of necessity, a system of self-care that is keen to avoid repeat trauma. this makes change difficult; it makes people who’ve had part of their psyches destroyed by unmanageable emotions push people and emotions away, create obstacles, generate unnecessary drama.

by emily rapp, “grief magic,” the rumpus

~

do not fall in love with a poet. they will turn you into metaphors and rewrite you so many times, you won’t know who you are anymore. also, they lie too beautifully.

~

i don’t believe in astrology; i’m a sagittarius and we’re skeptical.

by arthur c. clarke

~

i’m so tired of trying to say things to people and having them not listen, and that’s a lot of reason why a lot of people think i’m either depressed, or sullen, or shy because i just simply will not talk to you unless i think that you’re listening to me. i just simply won’t, i can’t.

by fiona apple

by running with scissors - augusten burroughs

~

i know exactly how that is. to love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. because they are all you have. because any attention is better than no attention. for exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. on those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks-accidentally-and punctures your skin. and then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. that is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.

by running with scissors - augusten burroughs

~

i have very dark sides in me but lately, i’ve been trying to be happier. i realised life is short. i’ve always been attracted to the dark side of life, especially in an artistic way. i used to hate everything. it’s important to be friendly and warm, even if it’s cool to be agressive sometimes.

by grimes

~

maybe i was destined to forever fall in love with people i couldn’t have. maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them. waiting to make me feel the same impossibility over and over again.

by  carol rifka brunt, tell the wolves i’m home

~

on your face there is something like the promise of a storm: one day passion will burn it to the bone.

by jean-paul sartre, from the flies

~

and every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, “this is important! and this is important! and this is important! you need to worry about this! and this! and this!”

and each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, “no. this is what’s important.”

by i wrote this for you by iain thomas

~

frollo saw esmeralda as a demon. quasimodo saw esmeralda as an angel. phoebus saw her as esmeralda. that is why esmeralda fell in love with phoebus.

by hannah b, on quasimodo ‘not getting the girl’ in disney’s hunchback of notre dame  

~

our culture has accepted two huge lies. the first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. the second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. both are nonsense. you don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.

~

these are the things, there are no poems for.
perhaps it’s because there isn’t enough in the moment itself.
it doesn’t seem important enough to stir the desire to write,
but somehow still it lingers.

~

1. do not hate them for it. they are on a journey too. 
2. understand that sometimes you will be a bandage caressing a temporary wound or you will be a pinnacle of permanency rooted deeply in their heart. accept that you do this to people too. 
3. do not step on your feet trying to find a rhythm you are not meant to follow. 
4. do not let it harden you: continue to nurture, continue to love.
5. people use words as anchors to latch onto bits of you and when they leave remind yourself that the sea never bled itself dry because a ship left it. 
6. write the nastiest letter and burn it.
7. yes, they may have illuminated pieces of you that you were unaware existed. but now you do and they are not the last person to remind you.
8. dizzy yourself with everything you love, like dancing in the greenhouse to horrid pop songs or reading haruki murakami. 
9. set all that anger ablaze, you are wasting your time sifting through it. 
10. internalize the fact that you were still breathing before you met them. 
11. forgive them.

by what to do when people leave

~

it was probably nothing but it felt like the world.

by morrissey, autobiography (p. 141)