the time is now

“It’s possible that a love’s sole purpose is to be unrequited, to build a pressure without release until we find an act that allows for it to escape—to seep or burst—from us. There are the common ones: booze, drugs, travel, academia, sex. I’ve tried them all. Certainly, none are enough to make up for the fissure inside—only an attempt to find a new way to breathe, to place yourself in the world of without.”

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again —”

Love makes me forget myself sometimes. I am horribly angry, I am sick with it, my vomit turns black, but this love. I can’t explain it, beyond that it is exactly.

“About noon, an arrow entered Joan’s body, just above her left breast, at exactly the place she had prophesied to her confessor on her way from Chinon to Orléans. She fell back, in shock and in great pain. She wept, despite her foreknowledge of the nature of her wound. It is as though she were surprised, not that she had been struck by an arrow, but that it would hurt.”

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles [Williams] is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s [Tolkien’s] reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself” now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”

I’m seeking

wrath and ruin the only things I can still swallow

“Embracing failure without acknowledging the real hurt and fear that it can cause, or the complex journey that underlies rising strong, is gold-plating grit. To strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important – toughness, doggedness, and perseverance. […] If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.”

My voice cracking like bones inside the radio. Silly me. I thought love was real.

No matter where you are or who you’re near, we come up for air together.   No matter my pace or distance, it’s you I surface to.

It was never you. It was always you: / your unutterable name, this growl in my throat.

I’m not afraid of you.