Kass H

“When Jeff Greene was in second grade, seven and a half years old, he got home from school one Tuesday afternoon in early March, and found a note from his mother, saying that she had gone away and would not be coming back.”
― Cynthia Voigt, A Solitary Blue

“There are things you want to say but don't
There are things I want to say but I already said them
A year ago or two or five, when we first met
There were times I thought you knew I loved you
You never knew
We never were
I died
You died
That's it”
― Dorothea Lasky, Rome: Poems

“I wanted, for so long, for someone to understand me better than I understood myself, to take control of me, to save me, to make it all better. I thought that the hardest part of a loving, mutually healing relationship would be showing my vulnerable, raw spots to a person, even though I'd been hurt so many times before. This has not been the hardest part.

The actual hardest part has been realizing that no one, no matter how compassionate and kind they are, will say the perfect things always. Myself included. The hardest part has been learning to communicate what I need, to hear what others need, to tell others how to tell me what they need. Intimacy takes communication. A lot of it.

We all have triggers. I don't know your triggers, and you don't know mine. No matter how much I love or trust you, you cannot possibly know exactly the words I need to hear, the words I don't want to hear, and the way I like to be touched.

And how strange that we expect these things of each other. How strange (and self-sabotaging) that we refuse to get into relationships and friendships with people unless they treat us in just that perfect way.

We've been raised to want fairy tales. We've been raised to wait for flawless saviors to rescue us. But the savior isn't flawless and the savior is not coming. The savior is you. The savior is still learning. The savior is never done learning. The savior is a human being.

Forget perfect. Forget flawless. And start speaking your truth. Start speaking what you want and how you want it. And start asking and listening, really listening, to what the people around you say.

Maybe, then, we will stop abandoning and hurting each other. Maybe, then, there's hope for us.”
― Vironika Tugaleva

“And so he found himself always in search of the perfect love, always unable to find it or sustain it, and predisposed to reenact his mother's bewildering abandonment of him.”
― Laurence Bergreen, Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius