Retrouvailles

There'll be a moment when you realise you're 27 when yesterday you were just 17; and you wouldn't be able to tell how a decade passed away and your life got divided into before and afters. The fury of youth will subdue and nothing will really change but everything will feel different when you look at old photographs and blurry videos taken on cheap mobile phones. Scents will remind you of childhood and certain friends you don't talk to anymore, hangouts will become reunions and mom's burnt pie will become the best food you ever had. And I know on some days you won't be able to show anything of those 10 years but I hope you remember to breathe, and let go of the knot in your chest. I hope you go out in the sun and live a little, because tomorrow is 37.

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.”

“Someone can be madly in love with you and still not be ready. They can love you in a way you have never been loved and still not join you on the bridge. And whatever their reasons you must leave. Because you never ever have to inspire anyone to meet you on the bridge. You never ever have to convince someone to do the work to be ready. There is more extraordinary love, more love that you have never seen, out here in this wide and wild universe. And there is the love that will be ready.”

when healing from a person.. you will have thoughts like “I loved them more than I loved anyone, I never knew I could love someone so much, I’ll never love someone that much again..”

“Whenever memories threatened to invade me, I would marshal all my strength to bar their way, snuff them out. I’d had to perfect a skillful method to get rid of them. First one must prepare the body to reach the mind: breathe slowly and deliberately from the abdomen; focus oneself by concentrating on this breathing. I allow the images to flood in. I isolate them by chasing away everything moving around them. I blink until they become blurry. Then I stare at one of them for a long time until I freeze it in place. I no longer see anything but this image. I take deep breaths, telling myself that what I see is only a picture that must disappear. In my mind I substitute someone else for me. I must convince myself that I have nothing to do with this image. I tell myself again and again: this memory is not mine. It’s a mistake. I have no past, and therefore no memory.”

“I missed you in a small way. Tiny enough to fold up and put in my pocket, and carry that loneliness with me everywhere I went. I’d forget all about you, until my hand accidentally brushed against that slip of memory.”