Because sometimes you just have to dance like a madman in the Self-Help section of your local bookstore.
I’ve always known I was gay, but it wasn’t confirmed until I was in kindergarten.It was my teacher who said so. It was right there on my kindergarten report card: PAUL IS DEFINITELY GAY AND HAS VERY GOOD SENSE OF SELF.
Love doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third day.
It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirt.
It just has to be.
Life goes on. Get over it. You’re still young. It’ll get better. Blah, Blah, Blah
I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I’m seeing we don’t live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It’s an infinite playlist.
The way you’re singing in your sleep
The way you look before you leap
The strange illusions that you keep
You don’t know
But I’m noticing
The way your touch turns into arcs
The way you slide into the dark
The beating of my open heart
You don’t know
But I’m noticing
It’s one thing to fall in love. It’s another to feel someone else fall in love with you, and to feel a responsibility toward that love.
You know what’s a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up.
— Tiny Cooper
Some days are like this. And the only way to get through them is to remember that they are only one day, and that every day ends.
But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.
What is it about the moment you fall in love? How can such a small measure of time contain such enormity?
What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.
In my kind of falling, there’s no landing. There’s only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you’re falling, it’s the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.
It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I can’t even make the comparisons anymore, because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. It’s simply a matter of is and is no longer.
You don’t know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can’t know every me, and I can’t know every you.
Maybe that’s it, […] [w]ith what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces. […] Maybe […] what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.
If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. You memories will be my most lasting impressions.
The key to a successful relationship isn’t just in the words, it’s in the choice of punctuation. When you’re in love with someone, a well-placed question mark can be the difference between bliss and disaster, and a deeply respected period or a cleverly inserted ellipsis can prevent all kinds of exclamations.