dieworten:

“You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated.”

— Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole 

ashliwood:

These are the things that burn up in a moment and we never touch them again because they don’t make any sense. All those things you used to tell me wildly and carelessly, waiting for the world to gobble us up, spit your love out like sunflower seeds in summer when the days go on and on forever. These are the things that break days, guilt and moments, the stuff that makes poets and fills notebooks. We believe in things so drunkenly in the glow of hope. We love things stupidly. Our jaws full of dragonflies, which like humans don’t learn how to fly until right before they die. But this is what I’m good at. Picking apart that level of uncertainty in everything and putting it back together again the way I always wanted it. Curving light and wondering about how lonely it is chasing things you can only get so close to. How is it that I was always the bravest when I was also the most naive? How can I keep smacking into things even when they shotgun through me leaving holes in places no one else can reach? and I can’t stop, I won’t stop, I want more. Like that feeling I get in the pit of my stomach staring at the string of buildings in the city emanating fearlessly from the top of the ferris wheel. Because like redwoods I burn from the inside. It’s like being on a carnival ride at midnight, going so fast you can’t catch anything and all you can do is laugh, how young and stupid and beautiful that feels. Always panting, forever distracted. Like those stars that get so hot blooded they burn themselves out, pow, right in the middle of your red giant you’re just a speck, a moonlet of your could-have-been, your ursa-almost-major. Humans are so sad and strange. The things I do make no sense. It’s like how a building is called a building when it’s already built. How I had more bones the day I was born than right now at this very moment– and sometimes I can feel them grinding up beneath me like all the things I never did. I am waxed and waning, always ready right when it’s a little too late. I am the side of the moon that the earth never sees because sometimes it’s hard giving all of yourself to something that might not get it, that might just pull its self away. Tell me, could the chaos ever accept you and me?

fr3ight-train:

acutelesbian:

fat-thin-skinny:

acutelesbian:

A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.

this fucks me up every single time

I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.

I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.

This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now