"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Sometimes I think about the people who have affected my life strongly, and I think about how much of their influence is actually them, and how much of it is me letting them affect me. I don't think it's just me, though; I believe that most people, when they meet a certain someone, will agree that he dictates many things. He dictates your mood. Your smile. Your day. He affects every single little thing that may mean anything to you at all.

And I wonder, when you're sitting there and you look up and see someone that may resemble him in the slightest way and your heart wants to stop--what is that? What is that? Does something in your brain recognize something negligible about him like the slight noise his shoes make as he walks toward you and say it's him, please look up, it's him and then your heart interprets it as a sign to stop?

I wonder what will happen when it all stops (because it does, eventually, inevitably). How will it feel to wake up one morning and just know that you are free, that you are living life once again? I'd imagine that it'd be quite liberating. And yet (I'm not sure if I want to know just yet).

"it's the tragedy of loving, you can't love anything more than something you miss."

extremely loud & incredibly close

I think one of the strangest feelings is the realization that you can physically miss someone. For a long time, I always thought of missing someone as an emotional thing: you don't see someone for a while, and you think of him/her, and you think, oh, I miss you, and your heart interprets it almost as a visit from a distant past. And then there's the physical I miss you so much, I can hardly breathe that reaches into you and claws at your heart until you sit there and you think this wave of emotion is something I could live without (but I'd rather not because the feeling of missing someone is something worth feeling).

I don't miss people physically often. When it happens, it almost always catches me by surprise, because I never like to admit to myself that someone means so much to me that I might miss him to an unnaturally intense extent (whether or not this because I am afraid or simply naive, I do not know). And it's pointless of me to even feel this way because the moment in which I do see or talk to him is always most anticlimactic. It is just the knowledge that he is there, that he is in front of me, that makes me smile for a moment.

"Sonnet XVII", Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were a rose of salt or topaz

or an arrow of carnations spreading fire:

I love you the way certain dark things are loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you like the flower that does not bloom

But conceals within itself the light of those flowers,

and thanks to your love, within the darkness of my body

lives the suffocating aroma that rises from the earth.

I love you neither knowing how, nor when, nor from where;

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride:

I love you thus, not knowing how to love you otherwise

than this way whereby neither you nor I exist,

so close that your hand on my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes grow heavy as I fall asleep.