You're searching so hard you've lost yourself

“I’ve always protected myself when it comes to love. And maybe that’s the problem. By not letting myself get hurt now, it ripples into much bigger pain later.”

“Some days I’m Van Gogh’s Starry Night other days I’m his suicide letter.”

“I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.”

“You have survived everything you have been through, and you will survive this too. Stay for the person you will become. You are more than a bad day, or week, or month, or year, or even decade. You are a future of multifarious possibility. You are another self at a point in future time looking back in gratitude that this lost and former you held on. Stay.”

“The soul usually knows what it needs to do to heal itself. The challenge is to quieten the mind.”

“You hold an absence

“There are memories that time does not erase… Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.”

“Miss someone until they come back, or until you come back, until their absence in your life becomes something to be avoided at all costs. Miss them until you don’t have to anymore, until you’re reunited in your favorite booth in your favorite restaurant ordering your favorite meal, miss them until it feels like you never left. Or miss them until you can’t anymore, until the things you miss are identified and cataloged as things and not a person, until you figure out that easy company and long talks and unblinking, all-knowing eye contact will find you again the way they found you the first time. Miss someone until you don’t.”

“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”

“It’s both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply.”

“We often want it so badly that we ruin it before it begins. Overthinking. Fantasizing. Imagining. Expecting. Worrying. Doubting. Just let it naturally evolve.”

“Maybe the courage I need has nothing to do with telling the truth and everything to do with walking away.”