on the awfulness of unrequited love

writingsforwinter:

Unrequited love is exhausting, almost physically draining, like teetering on the edge of recovery after being home sick for two weeks. But the problem with unrequited love is that there’s no cure, no chicken soup or bedrest to make you feel better again. The heart is a fickle organ, the most unpredictable in the body, and it wants what it wants for sometimes unknowable reasons.

Imagine what it must have been like for Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, just trying out their hearts for the first time. No instruction manual, no step-by-step rules that laid out the foundation and the uses. And if Adam didn’t love Eve, or vice versa, there would be no one else to project that unused love onto, no placebo.

When you see the one you love with someone else, it’s all you can do not to rip your heart out and throw it on the floor and declare your love to the whole world, to smash every plate in the cupboard or paint the walls with their name. It’s gut-wrenching, like asking for the whole universe and only receiving the stars instead.

And of course, if your love is unrequited, you sincerely believe that this person belongs to you, that they are yours. That you love them quite possibly more than it is possible to love someone. It’s like a Matryoshka doll: you can fit so much feeling inside your own body, again and again, layers upon layers going down, down, into the deepest parts of yourself. If someone were to unpeel you like an onion, they’d find all that unreturned love built up like great yellow reams of fat, insulating your kidneys and lungs, clogging your arteries. You’d never be able to escape it.

Sometimes you lie awake at night in bed and imagine all the things you could have said or done or been, the things that might have changed the course of fate and steered the ship of destiny in your direction for once. But unfortunately, while we have all the maps in the world for faraway countries or oceans or mammoth caves, no one, in the entire course of human history, has ever charted a path for unrequited love and how to find your way out of its forest. The first explorer that does so, and quite possibly the only, would most likely have an entire continent named after them, an entire island, an entire universe. Because the one person who figures out how to escape unrequited love’s grasp is truly a genius.

And sometimes you look at their picture over and over again in your school’s yearbook, flipping the pages but always returning to that one face, the smile you believe is meant for you, the hair parted just so, the smooth curve of their neck where it joins their collarbones.

You’d write their name upon the stars if you could, but for now you’ll just have to settle for jotting it down in your tattered notebook instead.

(via saltyoceansandmarmalade)

"

It is said it takes seven years
to grow completely new skin cells.

To think, this year I will grow
into a body you never will

have touched.

"

on surviving high school.

ifyourbonesareheavythings:

when the cold whispers of the kids on the patio
who don’t care for anything but the business of others
sink into your bones like the very chill of winter,
just remember that you are far more than the sum
of the parties you didn’t go to and the dumb things
you left for others to try;

you are living proof that it’s possible
to adapt to a hostile environment. 

(Source: wordsforspring)

It’s how you play the game

poorphraser:

Winners

Fall down

Get up
 

Losers

Feel down

Give up
 

So don’t 

stay down

Look up