Bad Girls with Perfect Faces

Life messes us up in so many ways, messes all of us right the hell up. And when we fumble and bumble around, crashing into one another, stepping on toes and hearts, it's not on purpose. Being a person is nearly impossible.

People act like being angry is a bad thing. Calm down, sit down, be quiet, be a good girl. Fuck. That. Anger is power. Anger is a weapon and a gift. Anger takes the pit in your stomach and makes it a black hole. And everybody watch the fuck out.

I had wanted to tell him that loving someone should never be a problem, should never feel like one, but by then I already knew firsthand it wasn't really that simple.

. Power you get from being beautiful is cheap.

The faraway monster always looks different than the monster in front of you, in your arms, in your heart. When someone you cherish does something incomprehensible, you will find reasons to decide they are the exception. You will cling to the details, tell yourself, but this is different. But it never is.

Be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.

Because what is getting over someone if not a slow, excruciating forgetting?

. But I also knew that when a story grabs ahold of you, it won’t let you go until it’s ready.

Eventually I got to know him well enough to realize this: he delighted in the small things, but also knew that in the grand scheme of the world, nothing we did or felt mattered at all. And he got how that was unbelievably terrifying, but also was the thing that made us free.

I am just a realistic person who is not too scared to admit that that is what all of life is: a bunch of activities we do in a row to pass the time until there is no more time for us to pass.

There was a pause then, texting dots appeared and disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again. My heart pounded. I wondered how many heart attacks each year are caused by those little hell dots.

The more secrets you have from someone, the harder it is to look them in the eye. Now I could barely look at him at all.

I told myself I would not be sad. I would feel nothing but anger now. People act like being angry is a bad thing. Calm down, sit down, be quiet, be a good girl. Fuck. That. Anger is power. Anger is a weapon and a gift. Anger takes the pit in your stomach and makes it a black hole. And everybody watch the fuck out.

No one thinks the people they love are monsters. Because love is the greatest liar of all.

No matter how smart you are, you'll just never be able to imagine any of what's coming for you, not until it's right there, standing on your throat.

: Be careful when your feelings are too strong, when you love someone too much. A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.

Pull and release and pull and release. But nothing was happening and I was not feeling very good. I was feeling very bad.

In a hundred and fifty years, this entire planet will be hosting a new big party full of people and nothing we did or did not do or meant or did not mean will have mattered.

I know that the universe does not give a crap about what we do. There is no order, no such thing as fair—nobody gets what they deserve.

Bad Girls know everything is gray. Everything is messy and complicated. And sometimes you have to do some fucked-up stuff to make things okay.

Standing there that night at Sloe Joe’s, I thought of Gwen’s silent house, her sick mother, of how easy it is to lose someone and how there are so many different ways for it to happen.