“To calm myself, I close my eyes, and his face is the first thing I see; it is not static and frozen, trapped inside a perpetual moment as it is on the film. My mind has preserved him differently. Oh!—How alive he was, and how alive he is now before my eyes!”
— Paper Stars, pg. 8
Your freckles beneath my fingers like Braille, speaking a language I never knew existed.
“They say everything in the universe is made of stardust—even you and me. We’ve got stars inside us, and sooner or later, we’ll find our way back home.”
—Benjamin Jastrow ; Paper Stars, pg. 95
“They say death touches all things, but they don’t know that loving makes you perpetual. They don’t count the infinities it creates. They don’t know that each time I hold your hand, a new moment—a new life—a new forever is born from me. They don’t know that I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes and that I’ll live a thousand more by the time I leave. After all, how could they? They’ve never loved like I love you, and they have never been loved like I have. So I’m not afraid when they tell me I’m going to die, not anymore. No matter how many times my body breaks, no matter how many times I die like every person does, I won’t. I won’t, because you made me invincible. And I’d like to thank you for that.”
—Simon’s last letter, 1965
You’re my confessional booth—I’m on one side of the lattice and I know you’re on the other. I talk a great deal and you stay quiet, but when you forgive me, it feels like God is forgiving me, too. I know you don’t believe in God, but that’s all right: you believe in me and I believe in you. We stick to what we know is real, and perhaps that’s for the better.
I kind of hate it when people say that they “live” for someone, that they can’t live without their love. I just find that odd. We as humans are so much stronger than that. I don’t like how people equate that to love. That’s not love. Love is not dependency, love is not desperation and reliance on another human being for “life”. That’s passion, that’s unhealthy addiction. Love is making each other happy, being loyal through good times and bad. The other person is like your best friend, except more than that. So while you might theoretically “complete” each other, you can still carry on your life without them. I just think it’s so odd when people feel as though they can no longer live when they are away from their significant other. If you lose them, you might struggle with crippling sadness, you might see their face every time you close your eyes, but in the end you’re still living and functioning. That’s what human beings do. It’s not healthy to rely on the presence of a person to live, and I hate how this has become such a romanticized trope. People are like, “he’s my romeo, she’s my juliet” and I’m sitting here, wondering if they really know what they’re saying. Romeo and Juliet were two hot-headed, impulsive teenagers who acted on passion and effectively killed, what, six people? And they were too unstable to live with the reproductions of their actions, thus romanticizing the idea of suicide as this noble, romantic thing.
So don’t live for someone. Live for happiness, live for yourself, live for everything.
Sometimes you need to learn how to stop thinking and talking and just breathe and tell yourself that there are still beautiful things in the world and that everything is not your fault.
Daniel&Lara
