• Probably too late for this not to get buried, but I have a story about this. We met in college, and were instant best friends. I was 20; she was 18. We spent all our time together, and were briefly lovers, but we never formally dated because both of us were very much into being wild and free and enjoying our youth. We dated other people on and off, but we talked about it and agreed that a committed relationship between the two of us would be an all-or-nothing kind of thing. Since neither of us wanted to give up our hedonistic, promiscuous, irresponsible lifestyle, we made a point of not committing to a relationship. A few years went by that way, and we were very happy, right up until her sisters died.

It was a car accident. They were 16 and 18, and both were killed in the crash. Dead on arrival at the hospital. My friend was utterly, completely devastated. It still hurts me to remember it, even now. Her father, though, was even more devastated, to the point where he was legitimately willing to let himself starve to death rather than try to go on living. She moved home, out of state, to take care of him. She cut ties with everyone for awhile, even me. I didn't see her again for two years. She was so different after that. Before the accident, she'd always been the most joyful, exuberant, positive person I'd ever met. After she came back, she was quieter, sadder, maybe wiser. I wanted to be there for her more than I'd ever wanted anything in the world. Not being able to fix things for her, not being able to make it better, that hurt more than anything I could ever remember. I guess that's when I realized how in love with her I was. I told her that I loved her, that I wanted to be there with her, and she told me that she couldn't handle the idea of any kind of emotional connection for awhile. Maybe a few years, she said. Maybe never. Maybe she'd never be able to open up emotionally again. She said she needed space from me, particularly from me. She said she needed to figure out what it meant to be alive in a world where her sisters were gone. She asked me to give her time, and I told her that I'd give her anything she wanted. She told me that she'd never been happier than she was when we were together. I told her the same. I told her that I understood, and that's when we made our pact. I was 25 then, and she was 23. We agreed: if she turned 30 and I turned 32, and if she had learned to heal, and if she hadn't fallen in love with someone else, and if I hadn't fallen in love with someone else, then we'd get married. So that's how we parted ways. She moved to Wyoming, to be alone. I moved to Germany, to get as far away from her as I could. We didn't keep in touch at first, but over the next few years we built up a correspondence. We wrote letters because we both liked writing letters. We emailed now and then. Sometimes we'd mail each other books that we thought the other would like. Years went on, and we became closer and closer. When I turned 30, I half-jokingly brought up our marriage pact. I told her that I hadn't ever fallen for anyone else. (I didn't mention this, but I couldn't have fallen for anyone else. I always compared every other woman to her, and in my memory she was perfect.) She replied that she was still very serious about our agreement, and that she'd never fallen in love with anyone else either. I asked her if she thought she had begun to heal, and she said she had, as much as a person could ever heal from something like that. A year later, she told me she'd like us to meet and spend some time together, to see if the spark was still there. It was. She was living in California at that time, and I found a job there. I'd always wanted to live in California anyway. I proposed to her six months later, and she smiled and told me "no fair", that I had to wait another few months, when she'd be turning 30. I thought it was silly, but at that point things were going so well that a few months didn't seem like they could matter at all. But I'm crying now, so I'll have to wrap this up quickly. She died. That's how the story ends. She was hit by a drunk driver and spent 2 days in the ICU before her body gave out. I went to her funeral. I spoke to her father but I barely remember what we said. I've never spoken to him since. I don't have the willpower to make myself find out how he's doing. That will be four years ago this November. I'm in therapy and trying to learn how to have feelings again, other than blank, mindless, miserable rage. I often wonder if this is what it felt like for her. She made progress. She learned to feel again. That thought is what keeps me going. She did it. She'd want me to do it. That's it. That's the story. It's a shitty story, and I hate it. EDIT: This is very difficult for me, in that I didn't expect to go back and re-read this, but all the replies dinging on my phone were too much to ignore. It's hard to explain what it's like to only have two emotional states - anger and nothing. Someone said this reminded them of a Nicholas Sparks story and... Here's the difference between life and a love story: in a book, she'd have regained consciousness before she died. In a movie, she'd have opened her eyes and looked at me one last time. I wouldn't have had to see her all smashed up with tubes in her throat. I'd have had a chance to tell her how much I loved her instead of the last words I said to her being, "Don't forget to pick up Scout's flea medicine." I'd be noble and tragic now, instead of a miserable shell of a person just trying and failing to believe that anything could ever be worth anything ever again. I'm sorry. I'm so angry. I want to delete this post but my therapist would tell me that this is progress, somehow. Thank you all for your kind words. If I have any advice to give, it's to go hold the people you love while there's still time. I have to go take some medicine now. Please have a very nice night. Thank you again for being kind.

• AlexClifford, Reddit
• Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgement
  • Orson Scott Card, Empire
• I'm an artist. Torture is pre-requisite.
  • Dawson Leery, Dawson's Creek
• Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful
  • The picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
• They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions
  • Pebble in the sky, Isaac Asimov
• There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you
  • Björk
• “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
  • Pablo Neruda
• “If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller’s felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
  • Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
• "I will miss your lips & everything attached to them."
  • Elizabethtown
• "My heart is a thousand years old. I am not like other people."
• "I recognise the smell of your skin like the sailor knows the sea."
• "He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone, she'd liked too much to be alone."
  • Summer Crossing, Truman Capote
• “I am so rich because I have you. I feel that there will always be a lot of doing between us, that there will always be changes and novelties. We’ll be connected and interested in each other beyond the connection of the moment.”
• “In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.”
  • Henry and June, Anaïs Nin
• “I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn’t explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?”
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
• “I find myself constantly searching for you in my things, and in other people (and their things) and in everything in general. I only read books with characters that remind me of you, and I throw my television out the window every night. The little pieces of you I get to see, that you ration to me work better than these drugs I smoke & swallow. Not fair. I circle where I think you could be on every map I see, I don’t think about who you’re with, or what you’re doing, but if there’s a circle there’s a number of miles, there’s a distance, there is not nothing forever.”
• “It’s funny. Your muscles have a certain memory about them. That’s why we can tie our shoes or play piano without looking. But then you spend a long enough time with someone and your bodies memorise each other, you know? The warmth of your back, the pace of your heartbeat, your tickly eyelashes, and the way your fingers would curl in sequence when I used to play with your palm. Another person is like moving to a new country where you don’t know the language, it’s a scary thing.”
• “There’s a reason why I said I’d be happy alone. It wasn’t because I thought I’d be happy alone. It was because I thought if I loved someone and then it fell apart, I might not make it. It’s easier to be alone, because what if you learn that you need love and you don’t have it? What if you like it and lean on it? What if you shape your life around it and then it falls apart? Can you even survive that kind of pain? Losing love is like organ damage. It’s like dying. The only difference is death ends. This? It could go on forever.”
• “We were never lovers, and we never will be, now. I do not regret that, however. I regret the conversations we never had, the time we did not spend together. I regret that I never told him that he made me happy, when I was in his company. The world was better for his being in it. These things alone do I now regret: things left unsaid. And he is gone, and I am old.”
• “I think she was afraid to love sometimes. I think it scared her. She was the type to like things that are concrete, like the ocean. Something you could point to and know what it was. I think that’s why she struggled with God. And I think that’s why she also struggled with love. She couldn’t touch it. She couldn’t hold on to it and make sure it never changed.”
  • The Dead-tossed Waves, Carrie Ryan
• “I have no idea why and how we ended. I just knew we were – it had. It was gradual but it was unavoidable. We are too different, you’re the golden ray of sunshine and I’m the silent silver moonlight. And yet we seemed to hit off, oil and water do not mix, there cannot be sunshine and moonlight at the same time but I didn’t care. You do see the moon in the daytime sometimes, don’t you? I was naïve, I was silly, I was in love. You made me look forward to every day, your every call, your every text brightening up my day. And then it was over. Gone. And this special, previous something we had between us became nothing. Lovers. Strangers. In one blink of an eye. Devastation.”
• "You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you, I wished for your existence. You will always be part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we have shared at some time the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage."
  • Henry And June, Anaïs Nin
• "I’ll follow you and make a heaven out of hell, and I’ll die by your hand which I love so well"
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
• "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all."
  • Oscar Wilde
• “Last night I wept. I wept because the process by which I have become woman was painful. I wept because I was no longer a child with a child’s blind faith. I wept because my eyes were opened to reality….I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”
• "They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life…but there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always that one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable… This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real— but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else."
• "I always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me. I always seemed to enjoy everything that hurt. The desire to inflict pain, that is all that is uppermost."
  • Albert Fish (Serial Killer)
• "I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing..I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."
  • H. H. Holmes (Serial Killer)
• "Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
  • Jonathan Safran Foer
• "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once."
  • John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
• "You make me feel like a person."
  • Requiem for a dream
• "Someone like you could make things alright for me"
  • Requiem for a Dream
• "I will miss your lips and everything attached to them"
  • Elizabethtown
• "I will always keep you safe."
• "I think I'd miss you even if we never met."
  • __(500) days of Summer
• "I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love,

and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me."

• Charles Bukowski (Raw with Love)
• "I want to be able to look at you, and not feel so hurt by you."
• "The silence between us stretched out, but it wasn’t awkward. Sometimes there are people you can be quiet with, and you never feel the need to fill the gap with meaningless chit-chat. I’d only become that close to a couple people in my hometown, and I’d always thought it took years. Lucas and I were already there."
  • Claudia Gray (Evernight)
• "For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves. I remove my jewellery and set it on the nightstand, I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair. I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine. I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air. I do it for love. For love, I disappear."
• "I often used to dream about you — vivid dreams with clear-cut stories. In these dreams, you were always searching desperately for me. We were in a kind of labyrinth, and you would come almost up to where I was standing. ‘Take one more step! I’m right here!’ I wanted to shout, and if only you could find me and take me in your arms, the nightmare would end and everything would go back to the way it was. But I was never able to produce that shout. And you would miss me in the darkness and go straight ahead past me and disappear. It was always like that."
  • Haruki Murakami (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle)
• "A human doesn’t have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die."
  • Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
• "I collect the words you say to me and wear them on a string around my neck, close to the pulse in my throat, the thump of my heart."
• "At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow."
  • Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)
• "But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart."
  • __Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms)
• "I wish I were close to you as the wet skirt of a salt girl to her body. I think of you always."
• "My blood is alive with many voices

telling me I am made of longing."

• "I tried to forget. but you grew roots around my ribcage and sprouted flowers just below my collarbones. all day i pluck their petals but i have not yet ascertained whether you love me or not."
• "

The first stain happened when your hand first touched mine. The second is black pen ink. The third was an accident, or so everyone said. The fourth is a burn or worse. The fifth is the name of a feeling I made up and then wrote down.

When no one’s around, I practice saying the words you’ll never hear. "

• "I could love you in the mornings and throughout all of the hours of the day. I'd love you in the evenings and as it was time to lay your head next to mine. I could love you for days and weeks and years and decades, until we're no longer able to stand up on our own. I will still kiss you goodnight every night and hold your hand as we walk through a park or down the street or at the grocery store. I would hold onto you for days and weeks and years and decades, until we no longer have the strength to do so from crippled bones and worn down joints. I'll still love you all the same."
• "I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder."
  • Zelda Fitzgerald, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
• "To me you'll always be the ocean and the moon/ antique collections and empty rooms"
• I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
• You are worth everything that nature can give you.

And I pray to whatever I believe in that you find your happiness. You find pride in yourself. And you find true love. And you can look at that person and understand the impact that have had in your life. Because you have surprised me with every step you took. And if letting you go means that I love you.

Then I love you. Have fun out there.

• We are whispering in his rented room,

sharing whiskey beneath somebody else’s sheets, when he says, I like it when you wear my shirts. They make you look pure. I laugh and take another swig before getting up to use the bathroom. There, bathed in holy yellow light, I look at myself in the cracked mirror: Little girl in an oversized shirt with bare legs and a butchered tongue, holding onto him to avoid coming undone. I should leave, I think. I should go home, climb into bed, and try to forget this entire thing. But instead, I climb back into his chest, shape my body into one of his limbs, and say, Take out my mouth, kiss me hard, pull my pants down and I’ll moan how you like. Give me a new name to wear, a new face to study. Help me out of this skin. I so easily brand myself as yours because I do not want to be mine. - Lora Mathis

• I’m meeting boys who like Charles Bukowski and they all want to do brutal things to my body. They tell me they buy a bottle of whiskey whenever they get one of his books and don’t stop reading till they’ve gone through a pack of cigarettes. They blow smoke in my face and say, “He was the outcast king of L.A. Did you know that, huh?” “Yeah, yeah, I know.” I say,“He’s great.”

A new boy gives me a worn copy of On the Road and thinks he’s being original. “We should explore the road together. Would you like that, baby?” I take a sip of my water and look away. Yes, I’d like that, I think. But he’s drunk and imagining himself sixty years earlier, in the back of a bar, sweating to the sound of live bop. Still, I prefer him to the hungry boy that devoured my shirt and said, “You have a tattoo? What’s it say?” ‘mad to live?’ What, are you angry about living? Aw, I’m just kidding, come here, let me take off that bra.” The next boy I kiss doesn’t read. I ask him to come to a bookstore with me and he stays outside, sighing. He has no interest in words. He has no interest in me. I am thankful for him. For a few weeks, I am able to shed my habit of thinking obsessively and become a duller, rougher version of myself. I dump him when my fingers start turning imaginary pages in my sleep. I go on a date with a boy who knows I like to write. He calls himself a fan of mine and swears he’s read every word I’ve put down. “You’ve got this voice that’s very modern, but also so classic.” I choke on my water as he says, “I read you to fall asleep.” At night, I listen to him pant metaphors and compare my mouth to the sea. One day, he stumbles across my journal and finds nothing about himself in it. “You don’t really love me, do you?” I shake my head. There is no use pretending anymore. He has read my poems about the boys I want to drown in me. His goodbye leaves my hands covers in ink. He wanted me so badly to be the sea, when all I am is a girl who writes poetry. I try my best to become poetry. I take a bath and stain the water with black ink. I cut my hair in a motel sink. I cry for people I have never met. I start smoking cigarettes. I use words like “presumptuously” and talk about “post-modernist new wave.” I walk the streets at 4 a.m. and smile at people coming home from a rave. I wear sunglasses indoors. I carry a 500 page volume of poems wherever I go. I drink coffee instead of water. I talk about the “advantages of using film and listening to records.” But no matter how hard I try, I am not the sea. I am a sunken ship that has drowned in everyone who touched me. - I am not the Sea/Lora Mathis

• “When he says

He doesn’t love you anymore, Roll your shoulders back And look him in the eye Even when it feels like your ribs Are breaking inward, like spider legs. When he digs up old aches That he swore he forgave you for, Smile And ask him why he didn’t leave you sooner. Ignore the way the words feel like sandpaper Running all the way up your throat to your mouth. When he blames you For mistakes that wear his face, Do not scream. Do not cry. Tell him that there are boys Who would be proud to say they’d loved you. Tell him that in two years You won’t even remember his name And don’t let him see the way you can taste your own lie. When he leaves Ignore the howling in your blood And do not get up after him. Not even to lock the door. Do not, do not Do not. Smell his shirts when you box them up To give them back. Not one. Swear off dating when you realize You’re chasing ghosts that wear his smile. It’s okay to cry over him. It’s even okay to forgive him. But do not go back to him. If he did not know how to love you the first time, He won’t know how to do it the next.” — How To Pretend It Doesn’t Hurt, by Ashe Vernon