You know, feeling and action are always linked, one can't exist without the other. It's sort of a hippie thing.

But sometimes you lose. Nothing you can do but admit it. -Eli

Don't be a fool. Don't give up something important to hold onto someone who can't even say they love you.

Pretend to be a delinquent?" I asked clarifying. "You can do it," Dave advised me. "Just don't smile, and try to look like you're considering stealing something.

Everyone laughed, and just like that, the conversation shifted, jumping to another topic. It was fast and furious, the talking, the emotions, the back-and-forth and forth-and-back. I realized that if I tried to focus on it too much, I got overwhelmed. So I just decided to relax into it, bumpy and crazy as it might be, and try for once to just go along for the ride.

If this was my forever, I wouldn't want to spend it here.

I'd been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough.