Rising

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

I think of books left unread, mornings spent not in love, bodies choosing not to touch. And if it is possible, I am thankful for death because I am thankful for life, because I can smell coffee brewing, I can feel my mother brush hair from my face, I can lay lilies on her kitchen table.

“Let everything happen to you: Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Hard to grow old still hungry. You were still hungry at your death.

As a child, I chased intangible things: wishes and fairies and stardust. When I grew up, I fabricated love out of phone calls and distance. I’ve never wanted what I could actually touch.

Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.

I look at your face and there, I feel it—my life rushing toward me from both directions, twin rivers reversed and crashing backwards into their source. You were improbable as that— your eyes flicking open a seam in the dark, improbable— us, laughing at the same time with both our heads on the same pink pillow, improbable—in the same city—both our hearts still going— What are the chances, I murmur when I reach out and touch your brow, How is this possible —

I can't hold enough of you in my hands.

“Sometimes the night wakes up in the middle of me and I can do nothing but become the moon.”

You're made of the same stars as me. You may not have walked fully formed out of the ocean but the past is the past for a reason.

I know it is my father's first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little.

At the end of the day, whether one returns to the past or travels to the future, the present doesn’t change.

Solitude was like a drug that she wasn’t sure she wanted to do without.