Matthew

“I think she's afraid to even hug me now. It's my fault, but I miss it, Andrew. I miss it so much it aches sometimes, you know?'

I do know. I do know, I want to tell him, but I let him talk. And he does, with a gut-wrenching honesty that tears at my heart.

'I want to be held. Is that so wrong? I want to be held, and stroked. I want to know that someone loves me. I want to feel it on my skin.' He looks at the ceiling and exhales, then meets my eyes again. 'But nobody touches me anymore. Not even when I have a fever. Mom just hands me a thermometer now.' He drops his eyes and his ears redden. 'Even when you kiss me, you don't touch me. It's like I'm a leper or something. I can hardly keep my hands off of you, but it's not the same for you, is it?”
― J.H. Trumble, Where You Are

“But surely even heroes weary lugging around the burdens of their heroism.”
― J.H. Trumble, Don't Let Me Go

“It's still not perfect, and maybe perfection isn't all it's cut out to be anyway. But it's good. It's really good. They say you can't always get what you want. But sometimes you can, and you do, even when you don't deserve it.”
― J.H. Trumble, Don't Let Me Go

“I’ll never understand why some people can’t just let others live their lives, you know,” Danial said. “You don’t have to understand. You don’t have to agree. Just leave people alone. When I look at the moon and planets and stars, all that narrow-mindedness and hate seem so petty. The universe is such a big place. One hundred thousand light years just from one end of the Milky Way to the other. One hundred. Thousand. Light years. In the time it’s taken for light to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other, thousands of generations have passed. It really makes you realize how small we are, doesn’t it? How short our time on earth is.”
― J.H. Trumble, Don't Let Me Go