“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

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.

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?

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

where there’s something in front of me waiting to be realized, but my consciousness hasn’t figured it out yet, and my subconscious doesn’t know how to communicate it to me either.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.

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.

I think there’s something romantic and poetic about how the light creeps up on the darkness that’s buried the horizon and blasts it away all gentle and blushy pink.

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