NadiLove

“... I am the jealous type ....”

I'm just a simple man who fell in love with a complex woman

You don't forgive because they deserve it. Most of the time they don't. You forgive to keep your heart soft. To move forward without bitterness. Forgiveness is for you.

“It’s not true what they say, that you can only give your heart away once. That’s the philosophy of the young. The old know better, they know it’s not the heart that you give away, but the mind. Fuck…shit…the mind is a powerful thing. It controls the heart, but most people don’t know that.”

That night I realized a few things about life. Sometimes the rain was more pleasing than the sun. Sometimes the hurt was more fulfilling than the healing. And sometimes the pieces of a puzzle were more beautiful when scattered apart.

Love didn’t come with guidelines. It flowed into a person with only hope as its current. There wasn’t a list of rules to follow, making sure you cared for it correctly. It didn’t give you instructions to keep it pure. It simply showed up quietly, praying you wouldn’t let it slip away.

“Because pretending to be happy is almost like being happy. Until you remember that you’re only pretending. Then you’re sad. Really sad. Because wearing a mask every day of your life is the hardest thing to do. And after a while, you get a little scared because the mask becomes you.”

“In an endless sea of overindulgence, find time to indulge in something worthwhile and make an informed, educated decision for yourself. What matters to you in here, will matter to you out there.”

“A lot of students have this idea that the real world sucks and inside the four walls of this [college] institution they’re safe, but there are things directly affecting them in the real world. And if they don’t take part by voting or campaigning or speaking to their congressman, then how can we know how to help them in the future? People thirty to forty years older than this generation are deciding the future, because they vote. If all the students participated, that could change.

Sometimes…well most times, I felt as though everyone else was doing amazing things with their lives, while I was stuck on the sidelines. When I was twelve, I told myself, ‘Just wait until I you’re sixteen, then the fun will start.’ At sixteen, I said I couldn’t wait for my eighteenth birthday because then my life would surely begin. Before I knew it, it was my twenty-first birthday. And now I that I was twenty-three, I’d all but given up.

Their eyes met. It had begun. They had begun.