but our subconscious is the real boss. Our conscious actions might be the ship we’re sailing, but our subconscious is the rudder that steers it.

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.

My head tucks neatly under his chin like maybe we’re Russian nesting dolls from the same set.

He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

Oliver’s never cared; he’s never wanted to know how to peer inside the minds of other people. I think he’s afraid of what he’ll find.

“That God that my mom thinks she serves—he’s so much smaller than who I think the real one is. The real one—to me, he’s everywhere, in everything. And sure, maybe he speaks through the Bible. But also maybe he speaks through Narnia, and Harry Potter despite J. K. Rowling lately, and the trees, and science, and the stars, and black holes and the

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?

strong-willed enough to master the entire spectrum of what it means to be a human. Ugly, beautiful. Happy, sad. Terrifying, wonderful.

Our relational pattern, until now, would have him believe that he can say or do anything he wants to me and we’ll just…rubber-band back to being who we were before it happened. He is right—kind of. But elastic wears over time. It stretches more, gets thinner, loses its shape. Even when you want it to snap back to what it was, it doesn’t always work