Take Me With You

I am so grateful for having a mind that can be changed.

I suppose I love this life, in spire of my clenched fist.

You keep worrying you're taking up too much space. I wish you'd let yourself be the milky way.

Our insanity isn't that we see people who aren't there. It's that we ignore the ones who are.

Beating yourself up is never a fair fight.

Some people will never understand the kind of superpower it takes for some people to just walk outside.

It's okay. Everybody's survival looks a little bit like death sometimes.

She makes me feel like I could win the lottery with a parking ticket.

What I know about living is that the pain is never just ours. Every time I hurt I know the wound is an echo, so I keep listening for the moment the grief becomes a window, when I can see what I couldn't see before.

There is no weapon more dangerous than a wound.

Why isn't it okay to say there are things we have not survived?

When the truth isn't hopeful, the telling of it is.

Coming into our own humanity often takes enormous effort, commitment and bravery. I believe we should be taught that at an early age. I believe part of the violence of our culture stirs from the myth is kindness is natural. I think kindness would only be natural in a world where no one is hurt, and everyone is hurt. So kindness is work. Kindness is knees in the garden weeding our bites, our apathies, our cold shoulders, our silences, our cruelties, whatever taught us the world 'ugly'.

Even when the truth isn't hopeful, the telling of it is.

Commit to loving yourself completely. It's the most radical thing you will do in your lifetime.

Just me and my suitcase, hanging out wit the sun, learning how to pack light.

This is for the times you went through hell so that someone else wouldn't have to.

I explain my gender by saying I am happiest on the road when I'm not here or there, but in between, that yellow line coming down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam.

They want you thinking you're bad at being a girl instead of good at being yourself. They want you to buy your blush from a store instead of letting it bloom from your butterflies. They're telling you to blend in, like you've never seen how a blender works. Like they think you've never seen the mess from the blade.

The trauma said, 'Don't write this poem. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.' But my bones said, 'Remember the boy who dove into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.' My bones said, 'Write the poem.

Patriarchy taught me how to take a punch better than I could take a compliment.

I stopped calling myself a pacifist when I heard Gandhi told women they should not physically fight off their rapists. I believe there is such a thing as a nonviolent fist.

I met a woman and we were lying in her bed, about to kiss for the very first time. Just before our lips touched she jumped up and ran to her closet and grabbed a stethoscope. She came back to the bed, put the earpieces in my ears, slipped the disc down her shirt onto her heart, and whispered, 'I want you to listen to my heart speed up when you kiss me.' And I kissed her, and I listened to her heart beat faster and faster and faster.

I know there are couples who never argue. But you and I, we are always going to fight for love.

I'm never gonna wait that extra twenty minutes to text you back and I'm never gonna play hard to get. I know your life has been hard enough already.

My first psychotherapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and my ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn't stop thinking how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

Just to be clear, I don't want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered there better be a thousand separate heavens for all my flying parts.

There is no weapon more dangerous than a wound, and being wounded there are things we have all done that we would almost would rather die that face into, but no one heals what they refuse to look at. So when asked if I believe in “good people”, I say I believe in people who are committed to knowing their own wounds intimately. People who read their wound’s diaries, who follow their wounds out windows, down ladders asking “Where are you going? What do you need? How can I intervene before a cruel thing is done or said?

Like Pac-Man, she swallows my ghosts.

I know some people build their safety with walls. Me, I'm into demolition - whatever tears the walls down. I have a hard time kissing without that kind of dust in the air. I see a wrecking ball and see a wedding ring, think, "Look at the size of that stone.