pétaledetulipe

“It was as though they knew me well by now, despite knowing barely anything about me. It was as though you could know a person without knowing the details of their life. You could know their light, because you shared the same light, the way I’d known the prayers the night before without knowing I knew them. I had never imagined this kind of warmth could be so safe, abundant. I’d spent so much time cutting and carving away at myself, worshipping cold. I feared that light and warmth were a trick, a tease, false offerings that lured you into relaxing, and just when you made yourself vulnerable, they would be seized. Better to adapt to the cold. Better to thrust the cold on oneself. Be prepared.
Yet with the Schwebels it was so easy. The light was sustained, plentiful. It wasn’t going anywhere. And so I ate what I wanted, when I wanted, maybe even overindulged compared to what a normal person would eat. I wasn’t sure exactly what that was yet, to eat normally. But I feasted on the food and the warmth, the cozy togetherness, and I realized that the food itself was only one part of what a person needed in order to be sustained.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed

“It takes a village to mend a broken heart.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer. It wasn’t the bricks around me that I’d somehow managed to rent or the roof over my head that I was most grateful for. It was the home I now carried on my back like a snail. The sense that I was finally in responsible and loving hands.
Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabin. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before.
I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love.
There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.”
― Melissa Broder, Milk Fed: A Novel