These Violent Delights

He couldn’t stand to look at the truth, even now. All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly

It always makes me a little sad when you laugh," Julian went on. "The way it sort of takes you by surprise. I love it, it has that sweet sincerity that's the best part of you, but it still kills me how you never seem to expect it. All I want to do is make you happy, and you're the unhappiest person I've ever met.

I hope you looked west while I was looking east, and that for a moment you met my eyes without knowing it. I know you never look away, ever when your eyes are closed, but I'm never certain you can see what's really there. I miss you to pieces. Yours Always - J

There’s this idea in psychoanalysis that I’ve always liked.” Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul’s arm. “It’s that what we call ‘love’ is actually letting your identity fill in around the shape of the other person—you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there’s nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too.

All they were—all they had ever been—was a pair of sunflowers who each believed the other was the sun.

He wanted to forget he'd ever yielded to the weakness of wanting anything. He wanted to scrub away any evidence that he existed outside his own head at all—that he was a visible object that anyone else could see and mock and judge.

He remembered the way love had burned through him like a flame under glass, grasping outward, devouring what air it had left before it choked.

I always think of a passage from the Symposium, this allegory about people who started off as two halves of a whole, but then something cut them apart, and they spend their whole lives looking for their other half so they can fit themselves back together. And that's how it feels, it hurts, it's like I lost you before I was born.

I kill them because they're beautiful, and it's the only way I can keep them.

Side by side they are twin angels on a headstone, cold and terrible and immutable. They were boys once, he remembers, but they aren't anymore.

The opening move was circled in red.

Believe in the things I try to tell you instead of the things you think you deserve to be told. Keep writing. It doesn't matter what about. Please keep writing.

If you paint a masterpiece and then set it on fire, it still would have mattered. If you know you’ve made something beautiful, who cares how long it lasts.

They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

Of course they would promise each other everything. Of course eternity would yield to them once they'd earned it.

If I have to deal with one more person today, I'll fucking kill myself." Paul almost snapped at him, but he didn't want to explain why the threat made him feel sick. Instead he said, very quietly, "I can leave." "Don't be dumb," said Julian, "you don't count.

But when they were alone, he could promise himself that he and Julian were each other's birthright, and that the only unnatural thing was the fact that their blood was divided between two bodies. He could believe that even calling it "sex" was incorrect, because it wasn't about anything so shallow as physical desire. They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.

They could only stitch themselves back together if they did something irreversible.

He endured it to punish himself, and to prove to himself that he could; those were the only two reasons he ever chose to do anything worthwhile.

What happens if I lose you again?" Paul didn't mean to ask it aloud, but he couldn't stop himself. "You don't." "How do I know that?" A sharp, inscrutable smile. "You don't.

...Paul realized he had been wrong all along to imagine his family wanted him to metamorphose into something softer and kinder and more docile. It was much simpler than that. All they actually wanted him to do was lie.

I don’t think you’ve ever felt anything that didn’t hurt you,” Julian said. “We’ve found each other, out of everyone else in the world. Does that hurt, too?

—and I had to see you like that,” said Julian, “this poor beautiful boy who can be so sweet and gentle when he can bring himself to trust me, who wants to save the world because he feels all the ways it hurts, he feels

Julian pulled himself closer and rested his head in the crook of Paul's arm. "It's that what we call 'love' is actually letting your identify fill in around the shape of the other person - you love someone by defining yourself against them. It says loss hurts because there's nothing holding that part of you in place anymore. But your outline still holds, and it keeps holding. The thing you shaped yourself into by loving them, you never stop being that. The marks are permanent, so the idea of the person you loved is permanent, too". Only as permanent as I am, Paul wanted to say.

He wanted to tear through Julian’s skin and map the shapes of liver and lungs, to memorize the path of every artery with his fingertips. He wanted to break Julian’s body open and move inside it alongside him, rib cages interlaced around a single heart.

In the end, there wasn’t any difference between trusting someone and underestimating them.

Their fathers make their fortunes pouring poison into the sky. What's a little one-on-one torture when you know the world is yours to ruin?

You figure out on your own what’s good and what isn’t, and maybe that idea ends up being rigid, but that’s better than not having anything at all.

And then they act like you're crazy when do you speak up, just to drive the point home that being shy is safer?