Passionate Soul

It’s when you reread over old text messages you’ve sent each other because you know they’ll make you smile. It’s when you learn to love those little flaws of theirs right away and see them as a part of their persona; those superficial imperfections that now don’t matter in the least bit because you managed to fall in love. They may remain but you learn to accept them and brush them aside, they stop bothering you. And you realize that they identify your flaws too, but being in love makes them brush it aside too. All you care about is the other person’s happiness over your own and you always think of them before yourself. You think of their smile. You think of their eyes staring back at yours and you can’t sleep in the middle of the night when you picture it. You can’t go to sleep because you miss their warmth, their arms around you in the dark. You are surprised that feelings could have such a crippling power over you. It’s when that person turns your world upside down and your priorities completely change. You can’t recognize yourself anymore, and yet you feel it’s the purest YOU you’ve ever been. But when you really know is when you feel like someone took the wind out of your heart, and sometimes you forget to breathe. Sometimes, you feel like pinching yourself because you can’t believe you have someone so special in your life who cares about you so deeply. It’s when you are away and absence makes that feeling explode and expand inside of you; when it just fills you up and suddenly you have time to think and you begin writing again. It’s like inspiration was gone and they suddenly brought it back to you. And sometimes it just hits you like a train, and you know. You want to reject the feeling and you want to remain in denial about its power, but there comes a moment when you just give in and decide to accept the fact that you are deeply and passionately in love with that other person. You don’t want to feel it because it hits you like a wave, and it’s a scary feeling because the wave feels permanent and never-ending which means you will do anything to keep it that way. You’ve never felt such certainty before. There comes a time in your life when someone pinches your heart with a poignant needle, and you know. You know that they have left a mark in your heart forever.

She wanted to be free. She wanted to revel in the silence and drown herself in words. 

In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” when Holly Golightly says she doesn’t want anyone to put her in a cage, Paul responds to her in this way: “I don’t want to put you in a cage, I wanna love you.” Then she refutes, “Same thing! I don’t know who I am. We belong to nobody, and nobody belongs to us.” 

She didn’t want to belong to anyone or be anybody’s anything. And sometimes she would wonder why it was so hard for people to respect that. She decided to shut herself away from all of those people, from all of those demanding answers. From all of those who wanted to claim her as theirs. She decided to stop trying to please everybody. She decided to be perfectly lonely. And she came to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.

*Jen will understand what I’m talking about. It’s a response to one of her inboxes. I just had to put it on here cuz it didn’t fit in the ASK BOX*

-ABOUT “THE ART OF RACING IN THE RAIN” by GARTH STEIN

OK, I hope you don’t mind my long response, but I wanted to share my overall opinion of the book with you.

Yes, that idea that you mentioned of Enzo becoming human after his death because he believed it is very interesting. It’s like if you take all these different religions, like Muslim, Christian, Mormon, Muslim, etc and apply them to that argument. If I was Christian for example, and I believed in heaven and that I would go there after death, it would come true, just because I believed it and for that mere fact it would become true. And yeah I agree there are some details (like the court stuff), which are out of place given the narrator is a dog. It’s just hard I guess, for an author, because they are important details that should be mentioned I guess. It’s been a year since I read the book, but I still remember it well, what I particularly enjoyed was Stein’s style of writing, the way he constructed his sentences and his word choice. Most importantly it really did feel like a dog’s perspective, you could feel his warmth and wonder especially at the time of Eve’s sickness. There are a lot of ideas that are discussed in the book, which I absolutely love, so most of my book is underlined in pencil in the parts I like best. The part where Enzo talks about listening is one of my favorites: “Learn to listen! I beg you. Pretend you are a dog like me and listen to other people rather than steal their stories,” he says in the end of his argument. (Go to page 101 if your edition is in paperback, to reread that awesome chunky paragraph. It’s the third page of chapter 19.)

P.S. And that feeling you talk about when reading a book is exactly how I feel all the time. There isn’t enough time to reread all the excellent books I’ve come across in my life, and even though I may remember major plot points in years to come, I will never remember the details, or a specific and beautifully constructed metaphor in that certain book. Thus, every time I start a book I really cherish it, because I know the moments and the feelings won’t be repeated. It’s like a “carpe diem” type feeling I put myself through :)

passionatesoul:

Very gently my heart took the incision from the scalpel, it seemed so gentle a slash. Shortly afterwards I realized that it had been torn open completely, and it wasn’t as gentle as I thought. With its sharpness it fooled me; it was tender and quick. What a fool I was to let it cut into me; what trust I laid upon it. It lured me into thinking this time it would be different: no cuts, no “heartbreak”. Sneaky but precise; my heart now bleeds to death. 

Very gently my heart took the incision from the scalpel, it seemed so gentle a slash. Shortly afterwards I realized that it had been torn open completely, and it wasn’t as gentle as I thought. With its sharpness it fooled me; it was tender and quick. What a fool I was to let it cut into me; what trust I laid upon it. It lured me into thinking this time it would be different: no cuts, no “heartbreak”. Sneaky but precise; my heart now bleeds to death. 

I was just notified that my piece “Coconuts” will be published in the prestigious national literary magazine POLYPHONY H.S. I think my heart just died for a second and then came back to life.

I will post an audio file of me reading “Coconuts” in a few hours!