Eugenia Vela

Just give in. Just fucking give in, and let yourself go. Immerse yourself in happiness before it slips away, out of reach. Don’t overthink. Don’t look both ways. Stop being so fucking cautious, because this much I can tell you: you will get hurt. It’s part of being human. So just give in, indulge yourself, kiss until your lips hurt. Hold her hand, kiss his scars, have a drink, eat the damn cake. Leave fear behind. Climb a fucking tree. And if you start to feel a little too much, embrace it. Because not everyone is that lucky. -e.v.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved… -Joan Didion, “The Year of Magical Thinking”