Kissing in America

All good writers are weird. Proudly weird.

I think sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.

Grief isn't like a map you can follow. It's not a simple route with a destination. Sometimes you loop back and find yourself in the exact same place you left.

There's a thing in poetry called the caesura a pause between words, a silence. I thought: that's what real friendship is, too. Someone you can be quiet with. Someone who understands your mistakes and forgives you.

Every poem is a love poem, my dad had said. I'd always thought he meant romantic love...but there were so many kinds of great love: mother and daughter love. Father love. Best friend love. Aunt love. Mother's best friend love. Friendish friendesque love. Love for the living and love for the dead. Love for who you really are, for those weird parts of yourself that only a few people understand. Love for things you yearn to do, for putting words in a page. Love for traveling, for people and seeing new ways to live. Love for the world...

Love is never easy or guaranteed. Real love is a leap, you know. As you get older, you learn how hard it is, how hard everything is, how we never know if there's ground beneath our feet, or if we'll be hurt or heartbroken. But we leap anyway. You have to take that leap.

Don't search for answers. I felt like I was always searching. Literally -- when I felt depressed I'd wander online, pressing links, looking for something that would make me feel better. I'd surf from friends' photos to strangers' blog posts about how to apply makeup, to the flight message board, to Googling Will for the hundredth time--and feel worse.

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

Lightning could strike twice, three times, or ten. When you're on the wrong side of the odds, the odds are meaningless. They don't protect you or give you comfort.

My dad used to say that giving someone a poem is like gifting them a feeling. Everything will change from black and white into color.

I took that leap, and I was flying

sometimes the biggest influence isn't what's present in your life, but what's absent. Those missing pieces that shape you and change you, the silences that are louder than the noise.

I love traveling, because you're escaping into life instead of hiding from it.

I love traveling, because your escaping into life instead of hiding from it.