Tag: quotes

fiveyearmission:

“Love is the look she gives me when we both come from work and we’re tired, but one of us has to figure out what dinner will be, and so we both go into the kitchen, put our hands on our hips, furrow our brows at what’s in the fridge. Love is each of us showering before bed, one after the other. We can’t shower at the same time, because we like very different temperatures of water, and that’s love too. I brush my teeth and she pees. The fog in the mirror gives way to a portrait of the two of us preparing to sleep. It’s a portrait of love, and we look at it every night. Love is the way her neck smells. That’s where it’s strongest, the side of her neck. And I lean into it and I breathe in, and I remember what it means to live with another person. Love is the hours we spend under a blanket on the couch, and love is also the hours we spend apart, earning a living so that we can return to the couch, once more lie down together. Love is the beat of the heart and the passage of air and it’s the circulation of fluids and it’s the equilibrium of all the functions that sustain us. Love is the absence of all she could say to me. It’s knowing that there is pain and choosing to never activate it. Not as a single choice made once and left secure forever, but a daily choice. Each morning we wake and she holds my betrayal in her hands and sets it gently down and we go on with the day. Love is not freedom. But freedom isn’t inherently good, there can be terrible freedom and wonderful captivity. Love is wonderful captivity. It is a constraint from which you never wish to escape. Love in the morning is a cup of coffee made just the way she likes it. And love at noon, as the way the sun through her hair makes an imprint on my breathing. And love in the afternoon, when I nap alone but nap knowing that she is pacing around the house somewhere. And her motion is near my stillness. And love in the evening, as a laying of hands and a stretching of limbs. And love in the quietest hour of night, when in a moment of wakefulness between hours or dreaming, I hear the soft hiss of her sleeping and feel what birds must feel when nesting. We are nothing if not absurd. We are nothing. Love as an activity and as an emotion and as a bodily function and as a series of decisions and as a meal prepared and eaten together at a home we share. Love as a person who returned to me and then never left again.”

— Alice Isn’t Dead, Part 3, Chapter 10: “An Ending” (via @alicescripts)

allthelonelyplaces:

I know we don’t get happily ever afters in real life. I’m a hopeless romantic, not a total fucking idiot. As my friend, Russell, said to me once, “Even with the happiest couples, one of you dies first.” But first there is such unalloyed joy.
We went to the supermarket yesterday and we were wandering around and,
at one point, he took my hand, because that’s the kind of thing he does. And instantly, I got flustered. Residual anxiety. Remembrance of past battery. Enduring scars. Even though I know I’m hardly likely to get my head kicked in by the salad bar, PDAs can still make me nervous. And then he said, gentle as anything, and I’m not going to do the accent…
“If there’s a gay kid in here with his folks, frightened that he’s a freak, don’t you think that it might give him hope, seeing two guys wandering around, being themselves, getting their groceries, like everyone else?” If happiness is a place… it’s the biscuit aisle in Sainsbury’s. And anywhere else I am with him.