Bookish Poetess

“ We all deserve to be treated kindly, no matter how inclined we are to fuck up.”

“Sometimes that’s all you can do in life, when it comes to pain – try and understand it. We all carry scars and scorch marks around with us. We cuddle up each night with ghosts of damaging memories – we let them swirl around our heads, never able to settle or heal because we can’t make sense of this terrible thing that happened to us, and why we’re finding it so impossible to get over. You can’t force pain to leave until it’s ready to. Like the most annoying party guest, it only leaves in its own sweet goddamned time. Meanwhile there’s nothing you can do but carry it until it’s ready to be released. But understanding the pain – why it’s there, why it’s not leaving – it makes that burden much easier to bear.”

“What’s more painful – torturing yourself with happy memories, or torturing yourself with bad ones?”

“Oh, by the way, when I say “excursion”, what I really mean is “an exercise in ritualistic masochism” – because what better way of mending a spurned heart than ruining yourself with memories of the good times?”

“You never know if happy memories are going to become sad ones. They glow and shine in the vast realms of our subconscious, making that part of our brain feel like it’s filled with glitter. We pick them up and cradle them like expensive cats, or wriggle into them like they are jumpers we’ve left to warm on a radiator. Until the day when, for one reason or another, life can suddenly make this happy memory into a sad memory instead. Good memories exist in the naivety of not knowing any better.”

“I guess a happy memory is only logged and labelled accordingly if you can live in a moment without fear of it going wrong. In the moments when true happiness is so overwhelming that you forget to be scared of it ending.”

“You never know at the time, do you? You can never know if a moment is going to make your life better or rip it apart and piss on the pieces.”

“When you removed yourself from your own thoughts and stopped to look at people—really look at them—you saw something surprising. Each of them—from the businessmen, phones pressed to their ears, loafers sidestepping puddles, to the tourists who lingered on street corners wondering which direction to walk—held a certain vulnerability about them.”

“We busy ourselves trying not to be lonely, trying to find purpose in careers, and lovers, and children, but at any moment, those things we work so hard to possess could be taken from us. I feel better knowing I’m not alone, that the whole world is as fragile and lonely as I am.”

“It’s all so unsettling, the type of wandering thoughts that could make you question your own sanity. I’ve certainly done enough of that in the last weeks.”

“A woman’s greatest foe is sometimes her hope that she’s imagined it all. That she herself is crazy rather than the circumstances of her life. Funny the emotional responsibility a woman is willing to take on just to maintain an illusion.”

“How dare he. How dare he love me one minute and discard me the next.”

“I remember thinking how fragile we were as humans, souls covered in tender flesh and brittle bone; one wrong step and we became someone else entirely.”

“These dreams, they are creations of darkness,” Ran whispered, without opening her eyes. “When we talk about them, we drag them into the light. We realize that they cannot hurt us anymore.”