“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”

Heartbreak

Heartbreak is a war that rages internally, with no end in sight. It’s like dropping a watermelon down a bridge-it will break into more pieces than it was ever made of, just like our hearts. It cannot be salvaged, nor glued back together, because the pieces are too hard to find, too minuscle to handle, even with the nimblest of fingers.

Like a dancer who has lost the use of her legs, heartbreak will cripple us in more ways than one. It will make a hole in us so dark and empty that we won’t even realise it’s there, right up to the moment when we get sucked in an we can’t get out, no matter how hard we try.

Or how much we want to.

Je suis
Tu es
Il est
Nous sommes
Vous êtes
Il sont
Je suis
Tu es
Il est
Nous.

Girl, Interrupted

Susanna: I’m ambivalent. In fact that’s my new favorite word.
Dr. Wick: Do you know what that means, ambivalence?
Susanna: I don’t care.
Dr. Wick: If it’s your favorite word, I would’ve thought you would…
Susanna: It means I don’t care. That’s what it means.
Dr. Wick: On the contrary, Susanna. Ambivalence suggests strong feelings… in opposition. The prefix, as in “ambidextrous,” means “both.” The rest of it, in Latin, means “vigor.” The word suggests that you are torn… between two opposing courses of action.
Susanna: Will I stay or will I go?
Dr. Wick: Am I sane… or, am I crazy?
Susanna: Those aren’t courses of action.
Dr. Wick: They can be, dear – for some.
Susanna: Well, then – it’s the wrong word.

Dr. Wick: No. I think it’s perfect.

I am a rock,
I am an island.

And a rock feels no pain
and an island never cries.

The Perilous Gard

“I’ve never thought of you like that,” said Christopher. “How could I? If you were any other woman, I could tell you I loved you, easily enough, but not you– because you’ve always seemed to me like a part of myself, and it would be like saying I loved my own eyes or my own mind.

But have you ever thought of what it would be to have to live without your mind or your eyes, Kate? To be mad? Or blind?”"

If You’re Afraid To Say, But You’d Like To Try

Lover forgive me, my guilt is my only crime
And I’ll carry it around till it breaks me down every time.

All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole.

I cannot take back what I have done, or what I might have said. Regret – it’s the saddest word in the world. The knowledge that I cannot do anything to fix it, or make it better in any way however big or small, is torturing me the most. I hate to look back like this, I hate saying things which I know I’ll hate myself for, and yet, I do it. Why is this so? Why am I being a totally different person from what I want to be?

I haven’t changed the slightest bit, haven’t become someone stronger or guarded. All that has changed in me is that I can no longer seem to project my emotions into something tangible. I cannot cry, nor bleed. All I can do is to sit here and replay everything in my head, and console myself with the notion that I am going to learn from this, and I’m never going back to what I was before. But the consoling isn’t working, the hurting isn’t easing up. I am left here unable to comprehend what has become of me. I am left here thinking about what has evolved from something potentially great to an utter tragedy.

I am left here knowing nothing except that this tragedy was caused by me.

I can’t forgive my naivety, nor my senseless hope and the pretentious way in which I’ve fooled myself. I guess the only way now is to accept that I am a fucking mess, that I am neither more mature nor strong.

Alvin, you were right. All I am is afraid. Now tell me what to do.

All the Spilt Milk Sex & Weight Will Fall Right Into Place

It’s harder to be friends than lovers
And you should never try to mix the two
‘Cause if you do it and you’re still unhappy
Then you know that the problem is you.

I am displaced. I have been hurled into perplexity, and nothing is registering in this discombobulated mind that I am ashamed to say is mine. I have gone nowhere in paving a path to get to you, and I am resenting the petulance that you’ve had to face from me all this time. Apology after apology, I churn them out but they alway return without even the slightest tear in the envelope. And with each next apology I send out, less of me is left behind, more of me is chipped and blown away, finally getting caught in the complex web which is us.

I cannot take back what I have done. I am aware that I am your girlfriend, and I am aware that I have failed mightily in behaving like one. I am sending out another apology, and this time I am sending you all of me.

Don’t send it back.

Faces

Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.

For example, it never occured to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply, but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.

The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

Right now, at this precise moment, I feel like Death. I can’t breathe, and my face hurts. I’ve never been this sick in my life, nor this desolate. It’s as though all the sickness and bad luck in my entire lifetime decided to befall me on this fateful day, and I’m utterly overwhelmed, to a point I’d say gladly that death would be liberation. Nothing but pure, blissful liberation.

ALVIN PHOON. WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU VANISH TO. I HAVE NEVER HATED AND CARED FOR SOMEONE AS MUCH AS I DO FOR YOU. STOP BEING A PUSSY AND TALK. TO. ME.