Welcome to our society. You will be judged on what you wear, your taste in music, what you look like and how you act. Be stylish, but look simple. Be tough, but look soft. Be a failure, but look perfect. Be a beginner, but look like an expert. That’s the style of life. Enjoy your stay. 

When I stare at the sky, I see you. When I turn to the ocean, I see you. When I’m looking at the moon, I see you. I know you’re in a better place and I know you’re smiling down on me, saying everything’s okay…we will survive. No one is born happy. When somebody loves you, everything is beautiful. You begin to see beauty in everything including the beauty you never saw in yourself, but they did. Sometimes you just need to take a deep breath to get through the day and know that better days are coming. Even if you don’t know exactly what they are or where they are, they are out there. Some may take more chasing and perseverance than others, but in the end, it’s worth it. Not just because of where you end up, but everything you learned about the world and yourself along the way.

The universe is huge. Time is impossibly vast. Trillions of creatures crawl and swim and fly through our planet. Billions of people live, billions came before us, and billions will come after. We cannot count, cannot even properly imagine, the number of perspectives and variety of experiences offered by existence. 

We sip all of this richness in through the very narrowest of straws: one lifetime, one consciousness, one perspective, one set of experiences. 

Of all the universe has, has had, and will have to offer, we can know only the tiniest fraction. We are almost alone and minuscule in this world and our lives are over in a blink. 

All of this strikes me as terribly sad, and if I believed someone were in charge, I could muster an argument that our awareness of vastness makes our tininess unfair.  

But here’s the thing. Literature lets us experience life through a second consciousness. For a time we share the perspective and experience of the author and his imagination. Our experience of the universe is broadened, multiplied. 

Without literature, we are all limited to our own lives. With it, we can know something of what it is to be other people, to walk in their shoes, to see the world their way. 

Literature needs no further defense than this, I would say. It is our species’s most advanced and successful technology for cheating dismal fate out of the abstract alone-ness it would otherwise impose on us.

I’m really starting to realize that we shouldn’t feel bad when people only remember us when they need us. We should feel privileged that we are like a candle that comes into their mind when there is darkness. I don’t mind being that  person that people turn to when they feel like they have nobody else. With how unstable, emotional, and chaotic I think my own head is at times, it’s nice to feel like the “rock” in certain relationships. It makes me feel as if I’m maybe not as unhinged as I thought. It provides a sense of stability that I need in MY life as well. Unfortunately, external stability being given to others isn’t enough to put my own mind at ease permanently. And all I can hope for is that one day, I’ll find that someone who can be my rock.