Everything Matters!

And knowing that the only alternative to your grief is the nothingness that’s fast approaching, you try to embrace your own sorrow, to be open and empty and let it all pass through you. This is the key, you have learned—to relinquish control, to relinquish the desire for control. Even in this late drama, to try and control is to go mad. And so you do your best to let it all go.

Everything matters not in spite of the end of you and all that you love, but because of it. Everything is all you’ve got—your wife’s lips, your daughter’s eyes, your brother’s heart, your father’s bones and your own grief—and after Everything is nothing. So you were wise to welcome Everything, the good and the bad alike, and cling to it all. Gather it in. Seek the meaning in sorrow and don’t ever ever turn away, not once, from here until the end. Because it is all the same, it is all unfathomable, and it is all infinitely preferable to the one dreadful alternative.

It’s a mystery of human chemistry that everyone is familiar with: liking someone instantly, well before they’ve given any real indication of whether or not they’re lik able

There is a peculiar comfort in being completely fucked, because there’s nothing to worry about anymore. You’re fucked, and that’s it

What it’s about is the slow drift apart that couples do sometimes, like the movement of continents, creeping and intangible. Because it’s so gradual you can go on for years, sometimes, doing all the right things to convince everyone around you, and even yourself, that you are half of a healthy and viable pairing. But the whole time you know, with increasing certainty and clarity, that the relationship is sort of undead. A zombie relationship. And like a zombie it keeps tottering forward, mimicking life, but without warmth, or soul, or even a pulse.

It occurs to me that when the way someone stands starts to drive you crazy, it’s probably a good sign that things are over.

He is in a deep, deep hole, and the last thing he needs is for you to show up with an excavator

The moment does not feel like I imagine it’s supposed to. There is no sadness. There is no anger. I do not cry. I am experiencing an utter lack of feeling, an emotional black hole. I worry, faintly, that this means I am a monster, but it’s more likely I am just in shock and cannot reasonably be expected to feel much of anything, right at the moment. Still, it seems wrong, this absence of emotion.

You’re the burned-out bulb in a string of colorful Christmas lights

Impressive as these numbers are, they serve only to illustrate that there is always doubt and fear, even among philosophers, fanatics, and triple-amputees with multiple addictions and relentless, agonizing memories of being whole.