What I'd Rather Not Think About

I'm either too much or too little. I'm terrible at dispensing the right dose of myself.

No longer among us but never far from our hearts. In the eyes of the world, he was just one person but to us, he was the whole world.

Cracks in the ground aren't always visible to the naked eye. Every movement has the potential to take you down.

I thought about all the love we have inside us and how only a shred of that reaches the people we care about.

To be a natural presence, you shouldn't take up too much space, which I always found easy at the beginning of a friendship. It felt nice to reshape myself into precisely the right format until the moment came, usually once I'd shrunk to my minimum size, when I got moody. I always have to be careful what I say around you, my friends would say. Or if I suddenly lost my temper over something that hadn't previously angered me, they'd say, I don't have enough space for this. Then I would know that my presence was no longer a given and it was all my fault -- it wasn't fair to pretend I was something other than who I really was, to keep shapeshifting like some kind of Barbapapa. I'm either too much or too little. I'm terrible at dispensing the right dose of myself.

This was shocking to me, because if the oldest person I knew understood even less about the world than I did, then how was it possible that other adults had all the answers? And what was the point of living longer if you weren't going to get any wiser?

Když si řeknete: tuhle chvíli si budu pamatovat po zbytek života, tak si ji zapamatujte. Musíte se u té myšlenky skutečně zastavit a zároveň do sebe vstřebat všechno kolem sebe, pak s vámi ten moment zůstane navždy, ať je sebenanicovatější.

Your life will slip away if you don’t share it with anyone, she said. And I’d explained how you could hold onto a moment. But you can’t use it to hold onto people, I said, because they can always just get up and walk out of view.

If you tell yourself, I’m going to remember this moment for the rest of my life, then you will remember it. You have to focus on your thoughts while simultaneously absorbing everything around you but if you do this, then the moment will stay with you forever, no matter how insignificant it may seem.

Suicide is an aggressive act, Elza recently said. If you’re capable of ending your own life, then you must at least have the capacity for violence.

the urge to kill yourself was a sign of true intelligence and sensitivity, a desire to escape the suffocation of the ego. For those who recognised the pointlessness of everything, suicide — or total surrender — was the only alternative

One dark December evening, I looked out the window and saw Leo turn into the street on his bike. I watched as he leant his bike against the facade of our building and searched for his keys in the pockets of his work overalls. Routine activities, as if it was nothing special that he actively chose every day to return to this apartment, to me. The downstairs neighbour's Christmas lights gave him a red aura. It's a miracle, I thought. With his keys in hand, Leo looked up. When he saw me standing there, his eyebrows shot up in surprise, as if I was the miracle.

My brother was vegan. He drowned himself last year. He was always a little more extreme than me.

My brother was the giant and I was a gnome. I was all the gnomes. I was way too much. And still, I hadn't been enough.

Hope is a drug. Only those who are prepared to die will know a life full of love. Those who are afraid of death will never penetrate the mystery of love.