There’s a saying about drug addicts that they stop maturing emotionally at the age they started using, and I’ve known enough addicts to believe this to be true enough. I think the same thing can happen in longtime monogamy.

“The strange and painful truth is that I’m a better person because I lost my mom young,” she wrote. “When you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.”

This is how you get unstuck, Stuck. You reach.

She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal.

fulminating

And it’s a kind of love that will kill you if you let it.

Ghastly, horrible, shocking, sad, merciless things. Things that would compel me to squint my eyes as I listened, as if by squinting I could protect myself by hearing it less distinctly.

The people who squawk the loudest about such things have almost never had to get over anything.

that moment they chose to tell the truth about themselves instead of staying “safe” inside the lie. They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn’t safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.