Sometimes we try to do the right thing and instead the world laughs as it crushes our hopeful dreams.

We are meant to love. We are meant to lose. Love is our promise of a bittersweet end, and our desperate, hopeless struggle not to hurt anyone along the way.

Inside all of us is a light, but some beacons are darker than others, and some are so dark they never realize they are a form of light at all.

My memories keep crashing into me, sneaker waves drowning the present.

What is love if not the gravity of souls?

The more things shatter, the more clear it becomes that the brittle and broken things will never again be made whole.

Keep the people uneducated and underfed and they'll lavish praise on you for your generosity when you give them a scrap of bread and a pat on the head. Give them more than the minimum and you might find they're better at your job than you are, because their skills are revealed when they can focus on more than survival.

Your heartbeat is safe and familiar and all things home. It's the dance of dust on top of the kitchen cupboards, the wind through the rosemary, the brittle flutter of textbook pages, the embrace of a memory until now forgotten.

She was lost time. She smelled of dusty libraries and unwound clocks, salted sand and rain riding on the first rays of dawn.

You can be scared. We all are. The trick is to not let that fear take you over. Let it simmer, let it wrap itself around you to keep you alert, but don't let it become you.

The only monsters in this world are men and myths.

He's dead, but he still chases me. He wrote fear into my mind with ink fashioned from his own blood. His words are stamped upon the shadows, gnats swarming about my shoulders.

We were born of stars and in death we will return to them. Let's not strive to be black holes in the meantime. Let's illuminate the world instead of darkening it, instead of tearing it to pieces. Let's prove we are worthy of being stardust.

I can't be free of this place, this haunted torture chamber echoing with thousands of years of blighted history. I can paint the walls, but I can't scrape the malice from the mortar. I can burn the curtains, but the blood splattered upon them only transitions to ash that stains the hearth.

Sometimes we find we love things we never thought we wanted. And then we regret that we never wanted them at all. It's the fear of change, I think, and dread of the unknown.

This isn't the end. It's only a bad memory waiting to be forgotten.

Our lives were a complex tapestry, and our woven strands were only meant to intersect at a small number of points in the time-conceived whole. An embroidered starburst, a missed warp, a complicated notion on the loom of time. We were always together, but meant to live our majorities apart, two golden threads wandering through a haunted textile life.

So much of what we hear about forgiveness is wrong. It's no virtue, and it's a forced lie unless it happens naturally. We pretend to forgive, trick ourselves into it, because we're expected to by people who don't want to be made uncomfortable, not to relieve our own pain. It's so one-sided, so dismissive, so quick to call a lack of forgiveness some sort of failing by the person who was wronged.

I'm not going to tell you to wear a mask to hide your sadness just because my own mask is on the edge of shattering.

I write to prove that we lived. I write both to remember and to let go. I write because I can't stop, not until this horrible story of ours is over and we're safe at home.