know by heart

“Miss someone until they come back, or until you come back, until their absence in your life becomes something to be avoided at all costs. Miss them until you don’t have to anymore, until you’re reunited in your favorite booth in your favorite restaurant ordering your favorite meal, miss them until it feels like you never left. Or miss them until you can’t anymore, until the things you miss are identified and cataloged as things and not a person, until you figure out that easy company and long talks and unblinking, all-knowing eye contact will find you again the way they found you the first time. Miss someone until you don’t.”

“No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That’s how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice.”

Sometimes it takes a heartbreak to shake us awake and help us see we are worth so much more than we’re settling for.

““That’s one of the great things about music. You can sing a song to 85,000 people and they’ll sing it back for 85,000 different reasons.””

“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”

““I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.””

“I urge you to please notice when you are happy.”

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly—it’s the best advice ever given me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.”

“1.) You will fall in love and it will be nothing like the movies. He’s not gonna come to your window and he’s not gonna kiss you in the rain. He’s gonna make you lay awake at 3am and he’s gonna make you wish you’d never met because your whole body feels like it’s on fire. 2.) School doesn’t make you learn anything except that people can be really mean. You won’t learn how to do taxes or vote or change the world but hell at least you can calculate velocity and bullshit a five page essay in two hours. 3.) You’re going to make mistakes and some of them will cause more damage and some of them you can’t fix. But that just makes other things happen and life throws a lot of curveballs at you that you need to make good things from. I promise it’s only as bad as you let it be. 4.) Kiss boys. Kiss girls. Kiss anyone you want and kiss people you don’t want to and cry about people who kissed people that weren’t you but never hurt yourself because of a kiss. 5.) Some days you won’t want to wake up or move. Some days, don’t. Most days, get up anyway. Take a shower. Sing. Pretend you’re happier than you really are. 6.) Don’t spend too much time hating yourself. Don’t act like someone else. Don’t waste time on pretending. Write love poems to you, from you and mean them. 7.) You’ll find yourself waiting for the weekend and waiting for summer and waiting for things to get better. Make them better and do not wait. 8.) Keep flowers always, wear whatever you want, hug as many people as you can. This is mandatory. 9.) Nobody knows what to do when you run out of toilet paper. Ask a friend. 10.) Never settle for less. 11.) People don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean. Ask a lot of questions and genuinely mean them. 12.) If they won’t hold your hand, don’t let them hold your heart. 13.) Nights are either the worst things or the best things. Sometimes you cry a lot and ask the stars why and sometimes you laugh and lay in the street. Treasure both. 14.) Things spoil when you try to force them to last forever. Appreciate the time you get with people or in places and don’t stretch it’s life longer than it needs to be. Not every friend will be with you forever. Know that it’s okay that way. 15.) Nobody understands their feelings. Write about it, paint about it, sing about it, dance about it. Cry about it. You’re not the only one who feels a little lost. Search for comfort in lyrics and poems. 16.) If your pillow isn’t comfortable, buy a new one. 17.) Nothing goes as planned. It’s beautiful though. 18.) People are going to hate you and call you terrible names but they don’t know what it’s like to be you and they certainly don’t deserve your attention. Pretend they’re sour milk. No one likes sour milk. 19.) Ever since you were born you have been working a full time job breathing and staying alive. You’re doing well. Don’t be so hard on yourself. 20.) Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When you’re at rock bottom just know that your low may be low but there’s an equal and opposite reaction waiting for you someday. Soon enough you’ll be at the top of the world.”

“How am I to exist in this shattered human language”

“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”

“Not just beautiful, though—the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.”