Zeerak J.P.

“If words are dead ends, then metaphors are doors that I can try to open up. When you compare pain to another thing, those that are listening can fill in the abstraction with their own interpretations. My friend’s pain was a bowling ball and mine is something like a tarantula who’s using my body as her nest. I can feel her pulling up my oesophagus, the lump of her body balancing at the edge of my throat. I swallow her down, but eight legs means she works her way back up again quickly. Fighting the pain is tiring, so eventually I fall asleep and when I wake up there are a few delicious seconds of quiet when I’ve forgotten what’s happened. But then I feel the bristle of her legs scraping against the pink smoothness of my gut and I remember. It seems like a fault of nature that my unconscious mind could be so cruel.
Maybe now that I can explain the pain a bit more, those who hear me will share in that feeling? Take some of it away with them?”

Excerpt From
Notes on Heartbreak: The must-read book of 2022
Annie Lord
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Annie Lord, Notes on Heartbreak

“You feel like you’re going to fall because you’re broken into a hundred different floating pieces,’ she told me. ‘You’re all over the place. You’ve got no rooting. You don’t know how to be with yourself.’ The back wall of my eyeballs finally gave way and tears poured out from the deepest well in the pit of my stomach.
‘I feel like nothing is holding me together any more,’ I told her, my breathlessness punctuating my sentence like hiccups, the stream of my tears on my cheeks as hot and free-flowing as blood.
‘Of course you do,’ she said with a new softness. ‘You’ve got no sense of self.’
So that’s why I was there. The penny dropped. I thought I had a fear of falling, but really I just didn’t know who I was. And the stuff I used to fill up that empty space no longer worked; it just made me feel even more removed from myself. This overwhelming anxiety had been in the post for a while and it had finally arrived, fluttered through the letter box and landed at my feet. I was surprised by this diagnosis; there I was thinking my sense of[…]”

Excerpt From
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“You know when you were a teenager and you’d see your mum with her best friends and they’d seem close, but they weren’t like how you were with your friends? There’d be a strange formality between them – a slight awkwardness when they first met. Your mum would clean the house before they came and they would talk about their children’s coughs and plans for their hair. When we were kids, Farly once said to me: ‘Promise we’ll never get like that. Promise when we’re fifty we’ll be exactly the same with each other. I want us to sit on the sofa, stuffing our faces with crisps and talking about thrush. I don’t want to become women who meet up once every couple of months for a craft fair at the NEC.’ I promised. But little did I know how much work it takes to sustain that kind of intimacy with a friend as you get older – it doesn’t just stick around coincidentally.”

Excerpt From
Everything I Know About Love
Dolly Alderton
This material may be protected by copyright.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“Slowly, her mouth spread into a grin. “I thought you said you could take a little trash talk. The vein in your forehead leaves me skeptical.”
― Tessa Bailey, Fangirl Down