Every You, Every Me

You don't know me. You know one me, just like I know one you. And you can't know every me, and I can't know every you.

There is no such thing as no choice. There is always a choice. The only question is whether it's a bearable one.

I don’t want you to think I got through this undamaged, okay? But I’m learning to live with it. Because otherwise, the damage is all you are.

Let’s always love each other, and never be in love with each other.

I had gotten so used to being alone, but never entirely used to it. Never used to it enough to stop wanting the alternative.

Void is when there is absolutely nothing there and the nothing is natural, a complete vacuum. But empty - with empty, you are aware of what's supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.

I have always been aware of how I break. I know what kind of situations will break me. I know what kind of people will do it. I know how much it will hurt.

This is the thing they don't tell you about being a third wheel - it's not like you're the wheel that's added on. You were one of the original two wheels, but suddenly you're not so important anymore. The relationship drives fine without you.

Everyone tried with me. And everytime, it felt like the whole point of life was to see if trying was ever enough.

There's no way to release yourself from a memory. It ends when it wants to end, whether it's in a flash or long after you've begged it to stop.

He was attractive. I knew that. And I knew that attractive people always got away with things.

Your life is inescapable. Unless you decide to escape it.

I try to be a careful person. Most of the time my carelessness is completely unintentional.

A photograph it a souvenir of a memory. It is not a moment. It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.

I thought about the word 'profile' and what a weird double meaning it had. We say we're looking at a person's profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it's the whole them we're seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you're only seeing half the face... It's never the way you would remember seeing them. You never remember someone 'in profile.' You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.

That word again. Happy. It’s a curse. The pursuit of happiness makes us deeply unhappy. It’s a trap.Before anything else happened, there was me in bed, thinking of who you used to be. I don’t want you to think I forgot.

You existed. You existed now as a fractal. Definition: A fractal is generally a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be broken into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Maybe I was a fractal. Maybe the photographer was a fractal. Maybe we were all fractals.

I asked you what you wanted and you said you didn't want anything. And I told you I wasn't planning on giving you anything; I was planning on giving you something.

That whole week, we started to divide things into those two categories: anything or something. A piece of jewelry bougth at a department store: anything. A piece of jewelry made by hand: something. A dollar: anything. A sand dollar: something. A gift certificate: anything. An IOU for two hours of starwatching: something. A drunk kiss at a party: anything. A sober kiss alone in a park: something.

That's the question, isn't it?" you said one night. "Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?

I couldn't remember ordinary moments, only the ones that had made an impression. Ordinary moments were the ones that fell away first.

If you zoom close-if you get really close to someone, if you really get close to yourself-then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anything anymore.

I barely notice colors unless I taste them. Not the yellows or the greens. I taste the deeper blues. The darker reds.

Every you, every me. Fractals. Fractures.

My mother said I should have a 'change of scenery.' The word scenery made be think of a play. And as we were driving around, it made sense that way. Because no matter how much the scenery changed, we were still on the same stage.

I was starting to think I was making up memories, just to have answers. Our brain does that sometimes. Or at least mine does.

When he talked to you, you seemed to fit in, but when someone else was talking, or he would be distracted, you jsut looked lonely over there. At least to me. But whenever I would tell you that, you'd say "I'm fine. I just slip out of it, you know?" And I'd say "I'll catch you," and you would say, "It's not the kind of slipping you can catch.

Two infinities: the one that stretches to the beginning but never touches-when you halve and halve and halve, infinitely-and then the one that spreads out into the endless, endless future, the endless, endless, distance.The set of infinities that is itself infinite.

It's you. You deserve this. There is a reason this is happening to you.