Ayden

“Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me -
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“I think of that spring morning, just before dawn. how she appeared at my side on the bench. how I felt so suddenly alive with possibility. saw in her a wondrous world, an open hand, a person I knew in my bones would be someone I’d love. how I had no idea. how the not knowing was the most wonderful and terrible thing. maybe I could do it again. Imagine her back. live on the roofs and trees of my mind with another her beside me forever. take her mesh hand in mine and this time never let go”
― Mona Awad

“It is also then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one's mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together, floating through the climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor's house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor's leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn't only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life