cynicism isn't wisdom

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"I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday."

Lemony Snicket. (via wallofbooks)

(Source: alaiakimberly, via bitchiestwitch-deactivated20120)

(Source: turquoisebeads, via loveyourchaos)

(Source: certifiedtragedies, via quiethouses)

"As I sat on my knees, recollecting all of this, it occurred to me that sharing books is an intimate act in a relationship. If sharing music is considered foreplay — which it is to me anyway — then sharing books is definitely going all the way. With music, you merely glimpse your infatuation’s tastes. Still, it’s easy to tune out a song you don’t particularly care for when you would rather listen to him talk or relish the comfort of his arms. But with books, you pay attention. You’re reading words; you’re consuming ideas and themes that move him; you’re connecting intellectually. Maybe even spiritually.

I could be overthinking this. But I can’t help feel a sense of loss knowing that my book, marked by my handwriting — ideas and phrases that spoke to me, underlined, circled, highlighted — is floating in the world. Just like a man I once loved."

The Books They Gave Me: Coelho.

  (via fabula)

(via teachingliteracy)

"If I am honest I will admit that I always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the part of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever."

Jeanette Winterson (via thechocolatebrigade)

(via divebarblonde)

"You mistake her name for the moon
Mistake porch lights for the stars
And sometimes they are
her constellations lead me home
ten thousand shades of open
and if there’s one thing in this world
I’ve ever known for sure it’s that this girl
is gonna crush me like a small bug,
leave me so fucking broken there’ll
be body bags beneath my eyes
from nights i cried so hard the stars died
but I’m like, go ahead, I’m all yours
I would kiss you in the middle of the ocean
during a lightning storm
‘cause I’d rather be left for dead than left
to wonder what thunder sounds like."

Andrea Gibson (via loveyourchaos)

Love Notebook #9

youveescaped:

(img via)

The first time I wrote this installment, I published a sentence, an obviously still wounded, angry sentence that didn’t come close to encompassing what we were, what we had and didn’t have. It’s been a year since I left, a few months since I really let you go, and even less time since I let go of New York. I remember when things were still good and you were jealous of earlier installments, as people began to read them and share them. 

“You’re just writing about men you were in love with,” you said.

“Yeah, but I don’t write one until I’m really done with that person,” I replied.

“Oh, good,” you laughed. “There won’t be one about me then.”

—

The first time you kissed me, you were running towards me, a full sprint towards my mouth. Out of breath, you wrapped your arms around me and pressed your lips against mine in public, lifting me as close to you as possible. You pulled back to look at me and couldn’t seem to decide whether to look at me or kiss me. I had on a little black dress and red shoes; I lost a shoe when you grabbed me to your body. For the first time in my life up to that point, I let myself feel more than I thought and fall hard.

Before you, I dated at arm’s length. I did not let people get close to me and I left the majority of men I dated before I had to get vulnerable. When I was 14, my cookie cutter family ended with my parents’ divorce and I carried this loss around with me. With men, I got out before I could be left; you were the first person I didn’t do this with. My mom commented on it after I finally left you.

“He was your big love,” she said.

“He’s not my big love at all.” 

“No but he was your first big love.”

In the days after I left, I didn’t want to give you that privilege, that place in the narrative of my life reserved for the first big love; she was right though. You were the first man I let myself really love, the first one who I gave of myself to entirely and completely. I learned how to love with you if not from you. I learned how to be an adult in love. I wish I could tell people that it wasn’t worth it, that all of the bad parts, the fights, the ugly, weren’t worth it but that would be a lie. It was completely worth it.

—

There’s a point in life when you realize that what your parents told you about right and wrong, black and white, is complete bullshit; few things are one or the other and people never are. They can do terrible things and yet no one’s entirely terrible. Even now, I really believe this, no matter how hard it is to believe in the consistently inconsistent. A friend asked me how we lasted so long, what with our problems, the distance, so many factors and I can only think that our good moments were that good, they were good enough then.

I fell in love with you again and again and I fell in love with New York again and again, watching the leaves change on the trees along the Hudson near your apartment, waiting for movies to start on summer afternoons, drunk and holding hands, you pulling me under your arm as we ran to catch our train to get home at the end of the night. The city was as bright, as full of potential as you were, as exhausting as you were. It breathed the way you did, restlessly in your sleep, in my ear keeping me up. It was our favorite movies and inside jokes about Argento films and baseball and your lips between my shoulder blades in the morning and good pizza when we were sober and better pizza when we were drunk. This is how we loved and it was enormous then.

We fought that way, too. The same city that lit us up, that had us running all over town, that made our hearts thump, witnessed our ugly. We got into a screaming match near Central Park one summer night and you left me crying in the street. I ran away from you after we had an argument in the dead of winter, both of us drunk but my tongue still cruel as ever. There were many subway rides that felt longer than they should have as we refused to speak to each other. We were usually ok by the time we went to sleep; however, the city never slept and our problems never did for long.

The love I had for you was big, huge even, and distance was never the problem. It never is the problem, really, whether geographical or emotional. Distance is only a problem when you can’t meet someone halfway, when one person carries both of you, when it turns out you can’t possibly carry the two of you forever. Eventually, every little problem that shouldn’t be big is too much to carry and you crack. What you couldn’t imagine living without becomes the thing that’s slowly breaking you.

—

It’s exactly a year since I left. It is one of few nights in the last year that is clear as a bell in my head. Our last night together was one of our best. We made dinner, we watched movies, we found ourselves in the usual position of me in the crook of your arm. As I closed my eyes that night, despite the disintegration of things, I thought that perhaps it would be ok; it wouldn’t be. We fought the next day about the things we had been fighting about for as long as we’d been together: the fact that I carried us almost completely, the inability to communicate, your complete inability to deal with anything, everything. You were angry and I was weary. You had to go to a screening and I refused to go, you slammed the door on me, my arms crossed, nude, on the couch. I knew it was about to end.

I called my best friend, I called my dad. I cried in such a state that my dad thought you had beat me.

“Get a room in a hotel and leave,” he said. “Pack your things right now.”

I got dressed and picked up my things, knowing I wouldn’t be back. You had bedbugs at the time that had eaten me alive and I rubbed my ankles together when they itched. My bags were packed and by the front door. I waited. They were still there when you walked inside, took off your coat, and kissed me. You apologized and said how much you missed me, how much you hated seeing movies without my hand in yours. I started to cry and you still had no idea. I couldn’t bring myself to say it at first, I all but said it but the actual words couldn’t come. When you realized what I wanted, your eyes turned dark.

“Say it.”

“You already know.”

“You need to say it,” you said. “I need to hear you say it.”

“I can’t,” I whimpered. You slammed your fist on the counter so loud that I started to cry.

“You need to fucking say it, Anaïs,” you growled.

“I want to break up. I’m leaving you.”

You started to cry and I tried to comfort you because that’s what I had done for the better part of a few years. You pulled away from me as I started to cry again. I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket, everyone I knew checking to see that I had left. I walked to the door and began to put on my coat.

“What are you doing?” You looked at me like I was crazy.

“Well, I’m leaving,” I said as I put my arms in the sleeves.

“No, you can sleep in the bed, I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“No, I’m leaving right now.”

“Where will you go?” you asked and your voice cracked along with what was left of my heart. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“A hotel, I have a room.”

You couldn’t accept this, that there was a room already. You wrapped your hands around my wrists as I tried to get the rest of my things together, you begged me to stay. Your fingers gripped me so tightly that I could see them there, purply green, a few days later. We cried together and I begged you to let me go. I pleaded until you finally did. I gathered the rest of my things and you walked me to the door where you gingerly put my grey scarf around my neck and buttoned the littlest button on my coat up to my neck for me.

“It’s cold out there,” you said with tears in your eyes.

You made me promise to let you know when I got to my hotel. I didn’t crack until I closed the door behind me. I wept in the elevator ride eleven stories down, I sobbed to your doorman when I asked him to call me a cab, I kept crying as I waited for it in the lobby. I cried as I checked into my hotel, as I put down my bags, as I texted you to tell you I was ok, and as I ordered room service. I cried even more as I ate my food, as I watched The Nanny, as I fell asleep in what felt like the biggest king size bed in New York City. 

The clocks changed that night and I woke up with an extra hour and not much else. I spent the next day drunk as you are supposed to after a breakup and fielding calls from my family and friends. You wanted me to come home to talk about things calmly. I couldn’t help but notice the sad irony in that you wouldn’t meet me halfway in New York City when that inability in general was a reason I left you. We agreed to meet the next day before I flew out. In the meantime, I drank tequila and wandered around the city. I no longer felt excited and energized by the streets as I walked 20, 30, 40, 50 blocks without a destination. I was exhausted by the previous few years, by the emptiness that I didn’t think was possible after loving someone so long. I was spent.

We met at a Starbucks the next day. I had my bags with me and I sat next to you as some girl directly behind me muttered to herself as she studied. You handed me a tiny ankle sock smaller than your hand.

“I didn’t want you to go back home and find it didn’t have its partner,” you said.

I started to openly cry in Starbucks as we said the things you’re supposed to say when you break up with someone you still love despite it all. Nothing was resolved; you wanted to work on things but I knew better. You wanted to take me to lunch before I left and you picked up my bag as we made our way outside. I shivered and felt myself already gone, not belonging to anything and ready to lift right out of my ballet flats. You took my hand like old times and I accepted it. For the next two hours, we were us and it felt like my city, the ones I fell in love with. You pushed through crowds to lead us down the street, we ate together and shared food, moving things we knew the other liked to their plate, laughing. 

You asked me if I wanted you to take me to the airport and I told you it was ok, that it would be easier if I went alone. We walked hand in hand to the subway and we wrapped our arms around each other. It was cold out and with my cheek against your chest, I felt like we could go back or that things might actually work out. I looked up at you and we kissed. We kissed desperately, like the first time we ever kissed except we knew how to kiss each other this time. Your hand was in my hair as we kissed outside Madison Square Garden and I heard a man whistle at us. I knew this was it. You pulled back to look at me.

“See you soon,” you said and I know you believed it.

“Ok.” I didn’t.

“I love you.” You meant it.

“I love you so much.” I did, too.

I kissed you again with wet eyes as I willed myself not to cry. I got on the elevator for the subway since I had so many bags with me and I looked at you as you watched it go down. You and New York and the whole thing went out of sight; I hadn’t left yet but it was done.

—

We hurt each other after that, we spent months privately and publicly hurting ourselves and each other again and again. I don’t like to think of that now. I like to think of the first man I really loved, the man I loved more than I loved myself. I like to think of how I learned how much I could give and how easy it is to almost lose yourself. I like to think of the way for a long time I wanted nothing more than your hand alone on the small of my back to guide me through a crowd. I like to think of how much you loved me and how, while it wasn’t enough, it was good and true in many ways. I like to think of dancing and laughing and the time you put cinnamon in a milkshake. I like to think of the ugly things, the fights, so I remember what I deserve, what I want from here on out. I like to think of that first kiss and that last kiss and all five boroughs and a love as big, as bright, as exhausting as New York itself. Just because a love can’t last doesn’t mean it wasn’t real, that it didn’t change you. You can’t go back, you won’t stay the same but I promise that one day, you won’t even want to.

excuse me, I am now sobbing hysterically.

(via anaees-deactivated20120422)

 
HOW CAN A STRANGER TELL IF TWO PEOPLE ARE MARRIED?

You might have to guess, based on whether they seem to be yelling at the same kids.
— Derrick, age 8 

WHAT DO MOST PEOPLE DO ON A DATE?

-On the first date, they just tell each other lies and that usually
gets them interested enough to go for a second date.
— Martin, age 10
 
WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE?
-When they’re rich.
— Pam, age 7

The law says you have to be eighteen, so I wouldn’t want to mess with
that.
– - Curt, age 7

-The rule goes like this: If you kiss someone, then you should marry them and have kids with them. It’s the right thing to do.
– Howard, age 8
 
IS IT BETTER TO BE SINGLE OR MARRIED?
It’s better for girls to be single but not for boys. Boys need someone to clean up after them.
— Anita, age 9

 Kids are really smart sometimes.

(via ohmilkthistle)