with my heart

scenes from an up & down, with plenty o' thrills & spills, but mostly excellent tiny life - my excellent life

Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. 
My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Sometimes when I can't find the words to express the feelings I'm feeling and trust me I'm always feeling something. Perhaps that should be a new goal of mine to practice feelinglessness. Kidding. As much as I cause myself great angst, much sturm und drang, I exhaust myself with all this feeling yet I wouldn't for a second want to be any other way. Because over on the flip side of all this sticky yuck are all the other feelings, the great feelings - of awe, of beauty, of wonder, of love, of comfort & of great immense gratitude. When I can't find the words for my feelings I hunt for them. A favourite poet of mine who's obviously spent plenty o' time hanging around in my head & with my heart Jonathan Safran Foer

I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

Jonathan Safran Foer

This final passage makes me cry each time I read it because this was me, my life, my every day & my every night for year after year after year. I can appreciate where I am today because I remember, like it was just yesterday, where I've come from. It was a great long distance away from here.

She awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day her heart would descend from her chest into her stomach. By early afternoon she was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for her, and by the desire to be alone. By evening she was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of her grief, alone in her aimless guilt, alone even in her loneliness.  

I am not sad, she would repeat to herself over and over, I am not sad. As if she might one day convince herself. Or fool herself. Or convince others--the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because her life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. She would fall asleep with her heart at the foot of her bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of her at all. And each morning she would wake with it again in the cupboard of her rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the mid-afternoon she was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.

Jonathan Safran Foer - more quotations, excerpts & his books here