“There are people who are always in love with the sky, no matter the weather. One day you will find someone who’ll love you the same way.”

“be with someone who never makes you feel dumb for the way things make you feel.”

“You are a language I am no longer fluent in / but still remember how to read.”

“( T )elling yourself you can do this ( R )ectifying your mistakes ( Y )earning and working for better results ( I )ncreasing your knowledge and skills ( N )ot letting the fear of failure paralyze you ( G )iving your best shot and not fixating on the end result”

“I tell him, if you love me, you need to stop reading the poems. I tell him, if you read them, you will find a version of me you hate. I tell him, if you want a future with me, you will stop reading the poems. Because the girl in the poems is kerosene dreams and ink stained scars and whiskey flavoured fury, and the girl he is in love with is cotton candy soft and summer dresses and vodka laughter. I tell him, he can’t have both because he doesn’t want both, no one wants a girl whose lungs are smoke black rage even if her heart is made of tissue silk. Girls who are both are too volatile, too painful to love. So I keep her, the ink stained, angry girl inside a prison of paper and pen. I feed her memory, I feed her sadness, so I can keep the girl he loves alive. There is witchcraft here, a kind of witchcraft every hunted woman practices when she finds love. She magicks parts of herself away to protect the one she loves. This is why they say that love is the end of all women, the way war is the death of men. So I tell him, please, if you love me as I am, stop reading the poems. And he says, his voice gentle, his voice wine rich smooth, I will not. Because I refuse to love you, unless you let me love you whole, all the broken things inside you that make you so soft.”