ava wirth

“One night, having spent a few days in peaceful solitude with my thoughts, I walked under the stars and along the cobbled streets and an idea crept all over me like arresting, vibrant blooms of wisteria. I don’t need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don’t need a guru to tell me things about myself I think I don’t know. I don’t need to cut all my hair off because a boy told me it would suit me. I don’t need to change my shape to make myself worthy of someone’s love. I don’t need any words or looks or comments from a man to believe I’m visible; to believe I’m here. I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeline. That’s not where I come alive. Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is—just me and the trees and the sky and the seas—I know now that that’s enough. I am enough. I am enough. The words ricocheted through me, shaking every cell as they traveled. I felt them; I understood them; they fused into my bones. The thought galloped and jumped through my system like a racehorse. I called it out to the dark sky. I watched my proclamation bounce from star to star, swinging like Tarzan from carbon to carbon. I am whole and complete. I will never run out. And I am more than enough. (I think they call it “a breakthrough.”)”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“I thought about an article I had read about premature death after Florence died; the one in which an advice columnist advised a grieving father not to think of the life his teenage son would have led had he not been killed in a car crash. This fantasy, she said, was an exercise of torture rather than of comfort. “You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,” I said. “It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.” “I know.” “Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.” “Yeah, I suppose it’s better not to dwell on what could have been.” “Don’t think of it as Sliding Doors.” “I love that film.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend came round and asked them “What’s the news, then?” in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens. So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip. The cycle works when it comes to holidays as well—I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.”
― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love

“In times of fear and grief, it is tempting to assign human meaning to natural systems. How many people have told me that a loved one has returned to reassure them in the form of a mockingbird singing at midnight outside a silent house or a swallowtail butterfly lighting on a freshly carved tombstone? When the world has lost its still center, we grasp for any reminder that it is nevertheless spinning exactly as it must.”
― Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year