keep it sweet

“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

“If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life — production, politics, and education — rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life’s comforts and peace, has merely increased man’s burden.”

I know this isn’t something you want to hear, but I think it’s something you need to hear: sometimes someone’s inability to love you the right way is not their fault. If you are the first person to show someone pure, genuine love, they may not know how to reciprocate because they’ve never experienced it before. In turn, they may not know how to give it back. This doesn’t mean that it’s your job to teach them, that you have to tolerate it, or that you deserve it, but I’ve found it incredibly helpful in my own healing to understand that sometimes people aren’t hurting you or treating you poorly intentionally. Sometimes people will self sabotage good things because they don’t think they’re worthy of it. Sometimes they just don’t know what to do, so they ruin it, whether that be by running away, being disrespectful, or causing pain. Sometimes, people still have their own growing to do. Sometimes it has nothing to do with you, it’s just that you happened to be there in the collateral damage. I don’t say this to justify any of their bad actions, but to offer a different perspective that may aid you in forgiving and ultimately reaching your peace.

“Let people celebrate their victories, even if they seem small to you - they might be huge to them. They might be what gets them through the day.”

“And if I had only one wish, it would be for you to start believing in miracles. I would wish for your eyes to stop looking at the ground and lift them up instead to what the world has to show you. Because this life has so much to offer, so many beautiful moments, and I’m scared you will never find them because you believe they are not for you. But they are. They exist especially for you. If I had only one wish, I would wish for you to believe you deserved to experience beauty, compassion and kindness. You deserve all the miracles in the world.”

“I think love leaves when it has to. It rushes out with the stale air when you open the window in an overheated room. It fades when you wipe the fingerprints off the counter and change the sheets. It slowly vanishes when the last letter has been written, when the last text has been sent. I guess there comes a time when it doesn’t work out anymore, for whatever reason, but I force myself to believe that it’s supposed to happen that way. That when it ends, it was fated to. I hope you left because you were meant to. That love walked out the door before you did, and that without it, you no longer saw a point in staying. That would make it easier to understand. Easier to justify. It doesn’t change anything to believe that it was neither your fault, nor mine, but it helps a little bit. So when love wants to leave, you have to hold the door open for it and bid it goodbye. And you have to let it go.”

“And all I loved, I loved alone.”