Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late.
You have to look at what you have right in front of you, at what it could be, and stop measuring it against what you've lost. I know this to be wise and true, just as I know that pretty much no one can do it.
We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.
You're terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.
You never know when it will be the last time you'll see your father, or kiss your wife, or play with your little brother, but there's always a last time. If you could remember every last time, you'd never stop grieving.
And I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.
Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.
I loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet's tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.
Phillip is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead.
Everyone always wants to know how you can tell when it's true love, and the answer is this: when the pain doesn't fade and the scars don't heal, and it's too damned late. The tears threaten to return, so I willfully banish all thoughts from my head and take a few more deep breaths. I'm suddenly dizzy from the panic attack I've just suffered, and I close my eyes, resting my head against the warm leather of my steering wheel. Loneliness doesn..
Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.
Sometimes you walk past a pretty girl on the street there's something beyond beauty in her face, something warm and smart and inviting, and in the three seconds you have to look at her, you actually fall in love, and in those moments, you can actually know the taste of her kiss, the feel of her skin against yours, the sound of her laugh, how she'll look at you and make you whole. And then she's gone, and in the five seconds afterwards, you ..
It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kid..
We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there's just something so damn tragic about growing up.
I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she'll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She'll throw temper tantrums, she'll need speech therapy, she'll grow breasts and have pimples, she'll fight with her parents, she'll worry about her weight, she'll put out, she'll have her heart broken, she'll be happy, she'll be lonely, she'll be complicated, she'll..
I'm not the same person I was. I'm fucked up." I give her a sideways glance. "I am," she says. "You haven't even scratched the surface." "I find that most people worth knowing are fucked up in some way or another."
The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.
I wasted a lot of time being angry, time I can't get back. And now I see you, so angry about what happened to your marriage, and I just want to tell you, at some point it doesn't matter who was right and who was wrong. At some point, being angry is just another bad habit, like smoking, and you keep poisoning yourself without thinking about it.
the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with b..
I wake up like this, this sense that I've somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right beacuse of some seeemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I've made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into...something.
And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benetar or the Cure on the soundtrack.
I loved her for the way she embraced the unknown, how she opened herself up to every experience. When I was with her, she opened me up, too, stirred my passion and heightened my every sensation. Which was great, until she left me and all my heightened senses to deal with the heartache of losing her.
I blame Hollywood for skewing perspectives. Life is just a big romantic comedy to them, and if you meet cute, happily ever-after is a forgone conclusion.