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gingerbrave

florence + the machine

gingerbrave

When did you decide that your love for me wasn’t actually love? That your true, holy love wasn’t for me?

Did you have to convince yourself, or someone else?

Was I another addiction?

The thorn in your flesh must be the innate, inescapable love for me, because I am not a thorn.

How can you say that I am not love?

earltrippedme

minipacifica

the night we met, lord huron

gingerbrave

You loved me, sometimes

onlinecounsellingcollege

“I loved you in a way I wished someone would love me.”

— Mahmdou Darwish

neil-gaiman

this may come off very blunt and out of the blue, but i need an answer and i can't ask anyone i know, so i apologise profusely if you find this derogatory in any way possible.

i'm 14 and i found out what death means when i was 3 and living with my grandparents. i figured that when someone dies, you can't see them anymore. you can't talk to them, you can't laugh with them. they aren't there anymore. and i cried. i cried so hard i vomited.

ever since i've struggled to think about death and what lies beyond. i'm scared. of growing up, of dying, of seeing people around me die. and i don't know what to do.

i know this will likely get lost among the hundreds of thousands of asks in you inbox, but if by fate you read this, please tell me

how does it feel when someone you know dies?

hank you, and i apologise once again if this is disrespectful. i know it's a pretty deranged thing to ask, especially to a well-known writer who has gone through life. i'm sorry if this brings up sad memories, but i need an answer.

all the best to you and everyone around you, mr neil.

Mostly it feels terrible. It even feels terrible when it’s someone who has been in a lot of pain for a long time or has not really been there for a long time and you know that Death has in some ways been a blessing: suddenly you are mourning the whole person.

It doesn’t get easier as you age. It gets stranger. The point where you realise how many people you used to know and like who aren’t there any longer, and you cannot talk to them or see them or laugh with them is painful in a way that I had never expected. The first time that someone you had a romantic relationship with dies and you realise that there had been moments both of you shared and now you are the sole custodian of those moments and one day you will be gone and they will be lost forever is peculiarly strange and hard.

But there is a comfort. And it’s the realisation that you aren’t alone in any of this. Everybody who lives will die. And we are here and doing things because other people died to make room for us, and we in our turn will die to make room for our children and their children and on and on.

I’ve followed Bourdain for the better part of 17 years, and losing him truly feels like losing a friend and mentor. He was the reason I became a pastry chef. He taught me how to learn and evolve through exploring new places, how to write your way through heartache, how to fuck up and keep going, how to appreciate simplicity, and how to tell stories rather than just reporting. I will think of him any time I listen to Iggy Pop, or travel to a place that feels like home even if I’ve never been there before, or when I quite literally suck the marrow out of life. Depression (and anxiety) can feel like an unscratchable itch. Your whole body vibrates with varying degrees of irritation and it seems like the only way to escape it is to jump out of your own skin. Sometimes it feels like a little demon lives in your basement and you have to make a trip down there to feed it a bowl of worms from time to time so it doesn’t come upstairs and make its self at home again. You can’t outrun pain. You just have to trust that you’ll survive it.

One day, you’re 17 and you’re planning for someday. And then quietly, without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.

-OTH