do you remember the first time you were called annoying? how your breath stopped short in your chest the way the light drained from your eyes, though you knew your cheeks were ablaze the way your throat tightened as you tried to form an argument that got lost on your tongue. your eyes never left the floor that day. you were 13. you’re 20 now, and i still see the light fade from your eyes when you talk about your interests for “too long,” apologies littering every other sentence, words trailing off a cliff you haven’t jumped from in 7 years. i could listen to you forever, though i know speaking for more than 3 uninterrupted minutes makes you anxious. all i want you to know is that you deserve to be heard for 3 minutes for 10 minutes for 2 hours forever. there will be people who cannot handle your grace, your beauty, your wisdom, your heart; mostly because they can’t handle their own. but you will never be and have never been “too much.”

I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for.

He licked his lips. “Well, if you want my opinion–” “I don’t,” she said. “I have my own.”

There’s a difference between somebody who wants you and somebody who would do anything to keep you. Remember that.

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

You think I can’t tame that? I always come home. Always. Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody: I’m bigger than God.

Kindness, peace, routine, are not enough. I get desperately restless.

Because I was always confronted with reality when I expected pleasure from a person, a country, a way of life I had imagined as pleasurable, I felt that pleasure was unreachable. Pleasure is an attitude, not a person or place.

Go on, get deeper, go deeper, and it will become good. Find your level. This is not yet you.

If you have been brutally broken, but still have the courage to be gentle to others then you deserve a love deeper than the ocean itself.