♡ revenant ♡

Picture this it’s winter, midnight you wake up shivering so much you think your bones will rattle right out of your skin nights like these you can’t tell the hunger apart from the cold 2am you lie awake wrapped in more blankets than you thought you owned you try covering your face thinking maybe you can suffocate the monsters swimming in your brain it’s winter and you are shattered like glass it’s winter and you’re disgusted by the prominence of your cheekbones and the pale ash of your skin still too lose around the edges Picture this, it’s spring and you’re tired of shaking it’s spring and you want to run outside in one layer too few as though your bare skin will invite the summer sun to absorb you faster it’s spring and you still can’t remember how it feels to be warm but you’re trying oh god you’re trying Picture this it’s fall and the leaves are almost as bright as your newly dyed hair the stylist finally agreed that it had grown back strong enough to be tinted with the reddish brown you love so much it’s fall and the pumpkin pie your grandmother makes doesn’t leave you heaving on the bathroom floor it’s fall and you’re not afraid to taste the air because it doesn’t feel like it will blow through you any more Picture this it’s winter, midnight you sleep with one foot on top of your blankets because you finally remember what it’s like to be warm 2am and you’re sound asleep unafraid of the morning to come, the meals to eat, the people to speak to it’s winter and you finally learned how to heal it’s winter and you realize that there is nothing more beautiful than the warmth of your soft, rosy cheeks and your light, porcelain skin it’s winter and you’re safe it’s winter and you’re strong it’s winter and you don’t feel so broken anymore

An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.