Our Galaxy

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but ‘Mom’s’ probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.

I gave too much of myself away, and I refuse to regret it. But you still have a piece of me with you, and I see it every time you pass me by and we avoid each other’s eyes. I feel it when I see your name pop up on a friend’s phone and my stomach drops a little bit. I notice its absence when I’m lying in bed on nights like these wondering what’s wrong with me. It’s been a while, so the memory of feeling whole is growing fainter by the day. And still I’m here, in bed, playing out conversations in my head that will never happen, yearning for a part of myself that I won’t get back.

We are products of our past but we don’t have to be prisoners of it.

It’s better to be your genuine self, and have fewer of the right kinds of people in your life, than it is to surround yourself with those who only accept you as long as you conform to their idea of who you should be.

“Someone asked me what home was and all I could think of were the stars on the tip of your tongue, the flowers sprouting from your mouth, the roots entwined in the gaps between your fingers, the ocean echoing inside of your ribcage.”

“I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find your'e not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”

“There are people we meet in life who miss being important to us by inches, days, or heartbeats. Another place or time or a different emotional frame of mind and we would willingly fall into their arms; gladly take up their challenges or invitation. But as it is, we encounter them when we are discontent or content and they are not. Whatever they are, we are not and vice versa. Two trains going in different directions that pass for a few powerful moments at full speed, blasting noise and wind but then they are gone. Whatever serious chemistry might have been possible if, isn’t.”

“I can tell you’re not yourself lately, and I hope wherever you’ve gone, you feel free.”

“I wanted it so much. I don’t know why I wanted it so much.”

Do you ever realize how badly you’re going to miss a moment while you’re living it? Like wow, these are the good days. I am here and I am happy and I feel alive.

“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.”

“Whatever someone you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end.”

“I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.”