Do I Still Love You? Truthfully, I Can’t Imagine The Day I Won’t

My first heartbreak

yes, love is work. but love must be two-sided. we are raised to give ourselves until we are drained. if they do not reciprocate, it isn’t love. love isn’t pouring gasoline down the drain in the hope the sparks you felt might light a fire that keeps you warm. love is coming in out of the cold, knowing they’ll already have made you a cup of cocoa.

“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever. And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”

— Aaron Freeman “You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral” (via focloir)

But I wish you did— care.

okay but saying “i wish i had known you sooner” — like the love in my heart is growing so big and fast for you that i wish i had the opportunity to have you way earlier by my side, because i want to love you longer than i can do now. my love for you reaches my past and makes a place for you.

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn’t this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle?”

— Hanya Yanagihara, from A Little Life

It must have been impossible to insult Kafka. Like, imagine that you call him an insufferable asshole and he just agrees with you. And then he would write in his diary about it.

February 15th I know I am the most insufferable of humans. Horrible. No sleep. Awful.

when the stars wrote back by trista mateer

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.”

— Osho

i have to stop going there (the alternate world in my head)