Valentina

“The stars out there, out west, are different, they’re brighter and bolder, and they make you feel that the world is so much more than you ever could have thought, that maybe you’d only been focusing on a tiny little corner. I know all those stars are there too, in my New York sky, but I don’t see them. There’s too much in the way. This was the space I was longing for and had been seeking out. But I could see now I hadn’t been yearning for that expanse to escape into, but rather to remember that I was a part of it. Right, the universe. Right, the sky, the stars, the unfathomable mystery of those faraway galaxies. The original, intended purpose for the word awesome. How had I forgotten about all this? It’s all right here.”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“Maybe we never fully figure it out. Maybe it keeps changing. Sometimes we’re the swimmer, sometimes the one being swam into.”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“I shook my own hand and started the rest of my life with myself anew: I’ll go where I want to go, buy what I want with the money I’ve earned, order whatever takeout I want with disproportionate sodas, do and see what I yearn to experience in the world, even if it means I go alone. If I made those plans for myself without setting any expectation of there being someone beside me, then I could never be disappointed because I was making that choice!”
― Abbi Jacobson, I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff

“There is a way to read a poem, and then there is a way to allow the poem to exit the body and be read by everyone in the room.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest