She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she’d felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she’d never stop.
“
| — |
Kristin Hannah |
How odd it is to come up for air and realize how far you’ve swum. When the land you once knew is just a distant speck on the waves and horizon is all that you see.
I've been with you here since you were nineteen and inspired. I'm 17 and nostalgic. (Remember when years still passed gently and none of us had tasted alcohol or the inside of someone else's mouth?)
AnonymousBe careful with nostalgia, it isn’t what it used to be. It twists and turns and chokes, and sometimes in the right moments, it even makes you cry.
I do remember when the years passed gently, when we were full and sleepless, loud and pounding. I remember when I used to make wishes on people like they were lost stars, when we were still chasing something sunlit and violent, something whole and wide awake. I remember when I was still young enough to trust the world and old enough to know that I shouldn’t, but human enough to do it anyway, and I remember what it’s like to be left fractured and changed. I remember being hemmed and halved, loosely bound to things you know will never last and the other half chasing after the infinite you know you’ll never have.
I have twenty-two years now rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. I am seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty. I am that fourteen year old girl crying in my mother’s closet because I felt the weight of everything and didn’t have the voice or the words to explain how fucking lonely it is when no one understands and you’re constantly looking for a feeling that’s never far but always fleeting, that’s too complex to try to explain to anyone else so you keep it in soft-spoken places where no one ever looks. I am fifteen and looking out over the edge of what felt like the entire universe. I am sixteen and realizing that nothing will ever be the same. And I know what it’s like to have the people in our lives leave blind spots on who we used to be. But I also know that this cramped and crooked place is the only thing that can knock the wind out of you, that can keep us alive.
So be seventeen and nostalgic. But promise me that you will also remember that you’re still young and you’re still brave.
And it was after months of silence that I realized we make better strangers than we ever did anything else.
