sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you're the bug

so, tonight with no real way to remedy my chronic insomnia, I started reading through old documents on my computer... Lame, I know. Strangely enough, though, it brought me a strange sense of relief. Old journal entries that never really made it online, English papers from grade 11, and, my personal favorite, a letter to Taryn from early in grade 12... What a letter THAT was. (fortunately for both mine and Taryn's relative sanity, I don't recall ever sending it). What they all taught me was a) sometimes I'm better at admitting things to a word processor than to myself, b)I desperately miss writing, and I love how my writing matured as I did. Finally, I realized how much I truly have matured since the journal entries from grade eleven, or the letter from 2 years ago (has that much time truly passed?). I read all the things I was saying to others and myself, and I see so strongly the person I was trying desperately to be, and even more, I remember the person I WAS, and how hard that person was trying to fit into the mold I had laid out. But it just didn't... Fit. Despite my stresses and worries and all the hesitation and change I'm facing in my life, I'm starting to discover that, realistically, they'll always exist in my life. I know better than anyone that change is constant, and sometimes, so is the pain... But at least I can say that, for the most part, I know who I am now. And.I'm comfortable in this mold. It fits quite nicely.

words to live by

My current haphazard remedy to insomnia.
My favorite quotes from some of my favorite books.
So let's do this...


- I’d long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren’t guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a goodbye at all.

-I was always That Girl. The girl with the dead parent. Everyone knew. It was always out in the open, written on my face. But the fact that I was angry and scared, that was my secret to keep. They didn’t get to have that, too. It was all mine.

- Shoulda, coulda, woulda. It’s so easy in the past tense.

- Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

- But that was the problem with having the answers. It was only after you gave them that you realized they sometimes weren’t what people wanted to hear.

-I can't count the number of times Wes has tried to secretly fix the hole in the driveway. I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It’s the universe’s way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It’s how life is.

- There’s an entirely different feel to quiet when you’re with someone else, and at any moment it could be broken. Like the difference between a pause and an ending.

- I’d tried to hold myself apart, showing only what I wanted, doling out bits and pieces of who I was. But that only works for so long. Eventually, even the smallest fragments can’t help but make a whole.

- For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You can never know for sure, so you’d better make every second count.• The truth is, nothing is guaranteed. So don’t be afraid. Be alive.

- Grief can be a burden, but also an anchor. You get used to the weight, to how it holds you to a place.

- That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Now. Now. Now.

- When I got to my own face, I found myself staring at it, so bright with dark all around it, like it was someone I didn't recognize. Like a word on a page that you've printed and read a million times, that suddenly looks strange or wrong, foreign, and you feel scared for a second, like you've lost something, even if you're not sure what it is.

- All you could do was take on as much weight as you can bear. And if you're lucky, there's someone close enough by to shoulder the rest.

- I wasn't used to seeing her this way. She had always been the stronger, the livelier, the braver. The girl who punched out Missy Lassiter, the meanest, most fiendish of the pink-bike girls that first summer she moved in, on a day when they surrounded us and tried to make us cry. The girl who kept a house, and her mother, up and running since she was five, now playing mother to a thirty-five-year-old child. The girl who had kept the world from swallowing me whole... Because life is an ugly, awful place to not have a best friend.

- When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed.