you never know how much you love something until it hurts you

It always fascinates me how people go from loving you madly to nothing at all, nothing. It hurts so much. When I feel someone is going to leave me, I have a tendency to break up first before I get to hear the whole thing. Here it is. One more, one less. Another wasted love story. I really loved this one. When I think that its over, that I'll never see him again like this... well yes, I'll bump into him, we'll meet our new boyfriend and girlfriend, act as if we had never been together, then we'll slowly think of each other less and less until we forget each other completely. Almost. Always the same for me. Break up, break down. Drink up, fool around. Meet one guy, then another, fuck around to forget the one and only. Then after a few months of total emptiness start again to look for true love, desperately look everywhere and after two years of.. loneliness meet a new love and swear it is the one, until that one is gone as well. (sigh).... There's a moment in life where you can't recover any more from another break-up. And even if this person bugs you sixty percent of the time, well you still can’t live without him. And even if he wakes you up every day by sneezing right in your face, well you love his sneezes more than anyone else's kisses.

2 Days in Paris
Julie Delphy




She held her arm against my arm, and it looked like an embryo next to a child. She said maybe she was still growing, and we pressed our legs against each other's legs, and these, too, were radically different sizes, and our curiousity was blossoming like a rose, we wanted to know, we really wanted to know, all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is. We wanted to strike lightning in dark waters, to see, if only for a second, the entire world that lives down there, the ten million species in amazing colours and patterns; show us life, now. We pressed our stomachs and lips together, and these, too, were different sizes, but my lips were roughly the same size as her ear, and her arm, when wrapped around my waist, felt long and, most important, was warm. We grew still and stared at each other. It seemed incredibly dangerous to look into each other's eyes, but we were doing it. For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink. For a very long time; you didn't need to get more ink, there was no reason to get anything else, because she was as good as me, she lived on earth like me, she suffered as I did. It was she who looked away and pulled the sheet to her chin.

No One Belongs Here More Than You
(Ten True Things)
Miranda July




The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do it wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has it's cause and it's meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has it's reason and significance: it's beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes we do see.
Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of it's parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals it's purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts