When you grow up as a girl, the world tells you the things that you are supposed to be: emotional, loving, beautiful, wanted. And then when you are those things, the world tells you they are inferior: illogical, weak, vain, empty. The world teaches you that the way you exist in it is disgusting — you watch boys cringe backward in your dorm room when you talk about your period, blue water pretending to be blood in a maxi pad commercial. It is little things, and it is constant. In a food court in a mall, after you go to the gynecologist for the first time, you and your friend talk about how much it hurts, and over her shoulder you watch two boys your age turn to look at you and wrinkle their noses: the reality of your life is impolite to talk about. The world says that you don’t have a right to the space you occupy, any place with men in it is not yours, you and your body exist only as far as what men want to do with it. At fifteen, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. At almost thirty, you find fifteen-year-old boys you have never met still somehow believe you should bend your body to their will. They are children. They are children.

Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.

We were growing up. It was one of those moments when you could practically feel the adult pushing out, pushing forward into the world. Perspective suddenly existed where it hadn’t existed before. This was just the beginning of our lives—our lives, things that we were responsible for, things that we could control. It seemed all at once too big and too simple an idea.

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— ‘I love you.’

Love is a form of pleasure. Pleasure is caused by the release of endorphins. The things we believe make a person attractive are based on pheromones. You respond positively to someone whose pheromones are compatible with your own, making you think you’re falling in love. But it’s all in your head. Literally.

There is not one moment when that feeling of inadequate sorrow goes away. It just lessens and lessens, until it is mostly a memory of itself.

That’s the thing about love — it’s full of possibilities. It can lead you down so many different paths. Sure, for some of us, it can lead to sadness and regret. But, for others, well, for others it can lead them to the greatest future they could’ve ever hoped for. Love is the most possible thing in the world.

People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be…when I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, “soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner”. I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.

To come home from another home is a weird feeling, because people expect you to be the person you were when you left, and that’s impossible. You expect things to be exactly the same as when you left, and that’s impossible. Maybe it’s impossible to even truly come home once you’ve gone away because of those changes. Coming home is strange, because now that place is just a tiny bit less of a home.

People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.