Ground Zero

I find Oliver staring at me. “Do you miss Jess?”

“Yes. She was my friend.”

“Then why don’t you show it?”

“Why should I?” I ask, sitting up. “If I know I feel it, that’s what counts. Don’t you ever look at someone who’s hysterical in public and wonder if it’s because they really feel miserable or because they want others to know they’re miserable? It kind of dilutes the emotion if you display it for the whole world to see. Makes it less pure.”

House Rules, Jodi Picoult

Autopilot

“There’s a reason I said I’d be happy alone. It wasn’t because I thought I’d be happy alone; it was because I thought if I loved someone and it fell apart, I might not make it. It’s easier to be alone because what if you learn that you need love and then you don’t have it? What if you like it and lean on it? What if you shape your life around it and then it falls apart? Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage; it’s life, dying. The only difference is death ends.

This, it could go on forever.”

Unaccompanied Minor, Grey’s Anatomy

Balance

“There are dreamers and there are realists in this world. You’d think the realists would find the realists and dreamers would find the dreamers, but more often than not, the opposite is true.

You see, the dreamers need the realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun. And the realists… Well, without the dreamers, they might not ever get off the ground.”

– Punkin Chunkin, Modern Family

I need to find my realist.

“In your darkest hour, I’d lead you through the fire”

“And some days were good, and some days were bad, and then there was a whole lotta other days in between that really weren’t anything at all.

Just existence. Just getting the job done.”

– Lisa Gardner, Hide

“It’s like tossing our hearts, to see where they land”

“Someone real,” I hear myself saying. “Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who’s smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands that music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I’ve known my whole life, even if I haven’t.”

Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home

… But I guess there’s a reason why fiction is fiction, and reality is reality, and that there will always be that line separating the two.

♥

“Reckless abandon, like no one’s watching you”

To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over it is not made anodyne by death. The hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?

Jeanette Winterson,
Written On The Body

*

I seem to have let this space wither away. Updating sporadically via mobile kinda keeps it alive, but just barely, methinks. Time is of the essence indeed, and it is time itself that I seem to be lacking these days. Or to be more specific, time during which I am productive – I’m shamefully admitting that on the rare days that I have to myself, I choose to just shut myself out from the world, literally draw the curtains of the windows close and just hole up within four walls for the entire day or two.

I hardly even pen any fleeting thoughts down these days; I’d choose to just close my eyes & sleep everything away instead.

How is it that one is able to lose their vigor for life so easily?

Or a better question would be – how does one get back that intensity to wake up in the mornings & LIVE each day to its maximum potential?

♥

“I was tired, I was hungry, I fight”

This isn’t what I want, but I’ll take the high road. Maybe it’s because I look at everything as a lesson, or I don’t want to walk around angry.

Or maybe it’s because I finally understand.

There are things we don’t want to happen, but have to accept; things we don’t want to know, but have to learn, and people we can’t live without, but have to let go.

JJ, Criminal Minds

“Sold my heart as petty cash”

At first I was confused by what passed for love in this world: people were discarded because they were too old or too fat or too poor or they had too much hair or not enough hair; they were wrinkled, they had no muscles, no definition, no tone, they weren’t hip; they weren’t remotely famous. This was how you chose lovers. This was what decided friends. And I had to accept this if I wanted to get anywhere. When I looked over at Chloe, she shrugged. I observed the shrug. She mouthed the words Take… a… hike… On the verge of tears — because I was dealing with the fact that we lived in a world where beauty was considered an accomplishment —

I turned away and made a promise to myself: to be harder, to not care, to be cool.

Brett Easton Ellis, Glamorama

“Some day, my pain will mark you”

“He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out.

Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through.”

 

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

 

 

“A voice of social change to rearrange the world’s perspective”

“Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because they are girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read, understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”

Rosemarie Urquico

*

For the dolls who have words as their first love, and who think no one would understand why but still yearns for someone at the end of the night. Your pleas have been heard.

Pax et amor,
♥