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One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil—lighthouse of your universe—as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing, “So you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” “Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.

Nobody can save you but yourself—and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won, but if anything is worth winning—this is it.

I will teach my daughter not to wear her skin like a drunken apology. I will tell her ‘make a home out of your body, live in yourself, do not let people turn you into a regret, do not justify yourself. If you are a disaster it is not forever, if you are a disaster you are the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. Do not deconstruct from the inside out, you belong here, you belong here, not because you are lovely, but because you are more than that.’

Somewhere between emotional and emotionless.

You can’t love someone unless you love yourself first — bullshit. I have never loved myself. But you — Oh god, I loved you so much I forgot what hating myself felt like.

"I think we had something." She said, "It wasn’t love, but it wasn’t nothing either. "And perhaps it was just stolen glances in long corridors, and laughing a little too much at each other’s ridiculous jokes." “Perhaps it was just feeling giddy at touching knees and pausing before breathing their name. "And I know that it wasn’t love," she said, "but it could have been. I’m sure at another time, in another place, it could have been."