Riyaad

“Willem,” I ask you, “do you feel like I do? Do you think
he was happy with me?” Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t
guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it. But you only smile,
not at me but just past me, and you never have an answer. It is also
then that I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another
universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but
tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the
air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein
and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in
order to remain alive and healthy, maybe you two are there together,
floating through the climate.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice