good news for people who love bad news

“No one can hate you with more intensity than someone who used to love you.”

“You were fucking me up but I loved you so I let you. We were fucking each other up and calling it love.”

People who wound us get no say in how we clean up the blood.

“Imagine this,“ he said. "You meet her at a party. She’s wearing a red dress that catches your eye. But really, you’re just focusing on her smile; the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she laughs. The way she brushes off compliments like she doesn’t quite believe them. The way she gestures with both of her hands. "Imagine you fall in love with her,” he said. “Imagine that on the first morning you wake up next you her, you’ve already decided that you could spend the rest of your life by her side. Imagine getting to know her. "Imagine deciding you want to marry her; confirming everything you ever thought. Imagine planning a future. Planning a life. Allowing yourself to dream. Feeling like things are finally falling into place; like you’ve finally figured it out.” “Now,” he said, “imagine that one day you walk into the kitchen and she is already awake. Imagine her sitting you down with an expression you don’t recognise. Imagine her facial expression as she tells you things don’t feel the same anymore; that she doesn’t feel the same anymore. Imagine the sinking in your stomach, the punch to the gut. Imagine watching her walk away after a half-hearted-suddenly-awkward hug. "Imagine a week later she comes to collect the box you’ve put all her belongings into. They spill out; her clothes; her toothbrush; her hair bobbles; pieces of her you never imagined you’d have to miss. Imagine you keep her scarf; the one she never wears anymore; the one that still smells like her. "The thought alone is enough to destroy a person,” he says, “don’t you think?” He paused to look at his hands. “Now imagine it actually happens. Imagine the pain that follows that kind of love.”

I looked at my mother because I was a version of my mother. I looked away from my mother because I was a version of my mother. I was me, but I was also her—my mother, and I understood this all too well.

I’m homesick all the time … I just don’t know where home is. There’s this promise of happiness out there. I know it. I even feel it sometimes. But it’s like chasing the moon - just when I think I have it, it disappears into the horizon.

“Have you ever told yourself it’s time to let go, you feel so desperate for holding on so long, you take a deep breath, telling yourself ok let go, then you find yourself crying. You know in your heart you can never truly let go fully, you love him so much. It fucken hurts so much.”

“Exiting from any long-term relationship comes at great personal expense, which explains why so many people are understandably reluctant to endure the cost of severance. Beginnings and endings are always dramatic and occasionally traumatic. Youthful brio allows us to engage in transformation. As we age, we carefully weigh the spectacle of continuing enduring harrowing situations or seeking melodramatic renovation of our core being. Analysis of the respective cost benefit ratio, consideration of the known versus the unknown, can delay or permanently deter us from altering our environment, leading our persona to become more rigid as we mature. Transformations in life are disconcerting to people who resist change.” 

“1. The last time you made the mistake of making a home out of a pair of arms and a soft smile, you learned the hard way that anything that moves, that can blame, that can cause ache does not deserve such an elevated status in your heart. Still, you are an anomaly, a wild thing hoping for a home. A sailor wishing to leave the ocean and return. 2. I still remember a day when your father had lifted you in his arms and told you that you are loved, more than you ever know. It was two days before the plane crash that took him. It was two days before I saw death dance in your broken eyes for the first time. I don’t think it ever stopped dancing there. 3. Yesterday, someone asked you, “who do you trust most in the world?” And you felt that your lips were sewn shut. Everybody you should love and trusts’ names felt rough and raw on your tongue like they were in a foreign language that you had become too ancient to learn. So instead you whispered your own name like a secret into the abyss and hoped no one saw the sadness that had crawled it’s way along with your name out of your mouth. 4. A summer ago, you asked me what it was like to not need a place to call home. I know you asked this from a place of trauma, that your trauma has convinced you it will all be okay once you find a home. But it is lying, because what you need up find is your healing. And I told you that wanderlust had etched itself so ornately into my bones that I had no choice but to travel till it had sated itself. You looked at me with envy, even as I thought of all the people who would love to make a home of your heartbeat. You however were looking for a certain kind of love that you would call your very own. A kind of love that would never abandon you the way everyone you have ever loved has. 5. Something about you glowed bigger and better than all the stars we gazed at in the night sky. And even then, even when you had everything, you longed for a human to belong in. But everytime you laid the foundations for something good, they came crashing and tumbling down on your head. Because your trauma is a perfectionist and no one could quite become what you needed and wanted at the same time. 6. I wish I had told you then what I told you in that very last letter before I left. That child, why did no one ever teach you that you cannot turn people into homes? People are rivers, ever changing, ever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside them. Still, that home you are hunting for does have a heartbeat. But it isn’t one locked in anyone else’s chest. Just look inside your own.”

People are impermanent. The love of your life will leave you. On a Sunday morning, they’ll kiss you for the last time.