words to live by // 06.15.15

Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost. | Kahil Gibran

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others. | Eleanor Roosevelt 

What wonderful thing didn't start out scary? | Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies 

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. | Rainer Maria Rilke 

We don't learn to love each other well in the easy moments. Anyone is good company at a cocktail party. But love is born when we misunderstand one another and make it right, when we cry in the kitchen, when we show up uninvited with magazines and granola bars, in an effort to say, I love you. | Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites--day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. | Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

One hears it a lot on airplanes: "Make sure you have your own mask on, before helping others with theirs." | Lemony Snicket, on what is the best life advice

What I'm Listening to // Hozier covers Van Morrison's Sweet Thing

ten years. two books.

At the start of Simon Van Booy’s The Secret Lives of People in Love, which is one of the finest, loveliest things I have ever read, he talks about two books he keeps under his bed. I think it must be in the preface or the introduction and perhaps I’m misremembering this--my copy of the book is stored away somewhere after last year's moving debacle--but he speaks of two books he has written that will never be published. Those two books--flawed and imperfect, and perhaps even unfinished--made him the writer he is. Those two books birthed his future books.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all that has happened in this city. I have never known an adult life anywhere else. It is easy to think my time in New York has been for naught. The hardest years of my life happened here, painful and incomplete and full of false-starts. It is here that I let go of dreams, said goodbye to more than one man I loved, got very, very ill, and worked very, very hard to get well. But I can’t help but think these ten years might just be my two under-the-bed books.

They had to happen so that everything else might.

And well, okay. I’m okay with that.

an open letter to all men, everywhere.

You want to know what sexy is? 

It’s the man who picks up the telephone. Who gives up his seat on on the subway. Who meets you at your door and pays for dinner, who is kind and good and whole. Who has suffered sadness, but no longer wears it. The guy who occasionally pulls out the suit tie. The one who is nervous to look at you, but looks nonetheless. It’s the guy who isn’t afraid of his own hope, who is more interested in being compassionate than cool. It’s all the things your eighteen-year-old-self didn’t know to look for. It’s the moment he musses with his hair and you know that he thinks about you, too. It’s his excitement and his awe. It’s the coffee and the newspaper and the weathered briefcase he carries in his right hand. It’s his lack of cool and the ease with which he accepts it. It’s his crooked smile and the flush of his cheeks. It’s the guy who says the things that aren’t so easy to say. Who cups the back of your neck and kisses you hard and shows up, even when showing up isn't terribly convenient. It's the guy who has done the work. Who goes to bed okay with who he is. 

untitled.

You are a good person. And I am in awe of this immediately. It makes me nervous. How kind you are, and how honest. How pure-of-heart, as they say.

There was no white horse, no dazzling suit of armor, just your soft voice and quiet footsteps. Your kind eyes and slow, deliberate smile. I spent those first few months just watching you, wondering what to make of you. Suspended in a thick, buoyant tangle of my own bewilderment.