Love
Giving your heart, keeping yourself
The bravest thing most people do all year is text first.
This room is about handing someone your heart. The love that feels like peace. The love that quietly asks you to shrink. And the love you owe yourself, without which none of the rest holds up.
They are not cruel. That is what makes it hard. They remember your birthday. They cried at your grandmother's funeral. When people ask, you say things are fine, and in most of the ways people mean, they are. But you have stopped mentioning the thing you are excited about, because they go quiet. You have got smaller at dinners. You have started editing yourself in the car on the way over. Nobody tells you that a love can be real and still bad for you. We are taught that real is the test. It is not. The test is whether you can be all of yourself inside it, and if the answer has been no for a while, you are allowed to leave. Even though they are not a villain. Even though they will not understand.
There is a certain kind of person who asks if you are okay, hears you say fine, and then asks again. They clocked the crack in your voice on the word. They do not make it about them. They leave a space for you to fall apart in, if you want to, and if you do not, they let it go. They did not learn that from a book. They learned it from being the one who said fine once, years ago, meaning the opposite, and having nobody ask twice. If you have one of these people, tell them you noticed. If you are one, let someone ask you.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love isn't a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle.
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot.
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.
Love is as love does.
If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
What you seek is seeking you.
Kindness is not flirting. Attention is not love. Silence is not anger. Tears are not weakness.