This Tiny Pang of Regret

Tell me,isn’t it ‪tragic‬? to ‪open yourself up like a museum‬, to turn yourself inside out, only to have everything stolen under the night.

I’ve got this tiny pang of regret when I think of how much I have probably missed out on in the last few years because I was too scared to take a risk, or too shy to speak up, or too worried to be bold.

You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.

I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

I also believe that introversion is my greatest strength. I have such a strong inner life that I’m never bored and only occasionally lonely. No matter what mayhem is happening around me, I know I can always turn inward.

Once I had started my solitude, I realized anew that it was easy for me to become accustomed to this state and that the most effortless existence for me was in fact in one in which I was not obliged to speak to anyone. My fretful attitude to life left me. Each dead day had its charm.

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Millions of people have decided not to be sensitive. They have grown thick skins around themselves just to avoid being hurt by anybody. But it is at great cost. Nobody can hurt them, but nobody can make them happy either.

I am thankful for my struggle because without it, I wouldn’t have stumbled upon my strength.

I am besieged by such strange thoughts, such dark sensations, such obscure questions, which still crowd my mind - and somehow I have neither the strength nor the desire to resolve them. It is not for me to resolve all this!

So you're always honest," I said. "Aren't you?" "No," I told him. "I'm not." "Well, that's good to know, I guess.""I'm not saying I'm a liar," I told him. He raised his eyebrows. "That's not how I meant it, anyways." "How'd you mean it, then?" "I just...I don't always say what I feel." "Why not?" "Because the truth sometimes hurts," I said. "Yeah," he said. "So do lies, though.”

- Anonymous

The 3 Questions

My mother tells me, that when I meet someone I like, I have to ask them three questions: 1. what are you afraid of? 2. do you like dogs? 3. what do you do when it rains? Of those three, she says the first one is the most important.

“They gotta be scared of something, baby. Everybody is. If they aren’t afraid of anything, then they don’t believe in anything, either.”

I met you on a Sunday, right after church. one look and my heart fell into my stomach like a trap door. On our second date, I asked you what you were afraid of. “Spiders, mostly. being alone. little children, like, the ones who just learned how to push a kid over on the playground. oh and space. holy shit, space.” I asked you if you liked dogs.I have three.” I asked you what you do when it rains.“Sleep, mostly. sometimes I sit at the window and watch the rain droplets race. I make a shelter out of plastic in my backyard for all the stray animals; leave them food and a place to sleep.”. He smiled like he knew. Like his mom told him the same thing.

“How about you?”

Me? I’m scared of everything. Of the hole in the o-zone layer, Of the lady next door who never smiles at her dog, and especially of all the secrets the government must be breaking it’s back trying to keep from us. I love dogs so much, you have no idea. I sleep when it rains. I want to tell everyone I love them. I want to find every stray animal and bring them home. I want to wake up in your hair and make you shitty coffee and kiss your neck and draw silly stick figures of us.I never want to ask anyone else these questions ever again. - Anonymous