But what is so headstrong as youth?

She asked me if I was happy the other day. I said I think so. Then she asked what it felt like. I couldn't really say. It's easier to describe the feeling when you're sad because it's a heavy thing in your pockets. But happy is just the walk home. You don't even notice it.

“Please just move the hell on. I don’t want to have to be the one who mourns everything when everyone else has clearly forgotten. It’s mortifying. It’s mortifying to be the one who remembers.”

“I am a lover without a lover. I am lovely and lonely and I belong deeply to myself.”

“i am crowded by your absence.”

“Somewhere on the other side of this wide night / and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.”

“Come love, make me better than I was. Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name.”

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

“Perhaps—I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”