I Wrote This for You Read online

  Here is something I believe: I believe that we don’t know how people work when we’re young and maybe that’s why we’re so reckless with each other when we’re young.

  I think people think that people come and go, in and out of life and I think that school teaches them that, that life changes in big annual movements, that one year you’re this and the next, you’re that. But life blends into itself as you get older and you realise, you will watch a few, if not many, of your friends get old.

  You will watch them lose their minds and their hair. You will watch them get sick and get better. You will watch them succeed and fail. You will watch them get married, get divorced, get pregnant and yes, eventually, you will watch them die. Or they will watch you die.

  So this is what I believe friendship means. And I’m sorry to have to put such a heavy burden on you. But you have put the same burden on me.

  Now you can tell me something you believe, as it is your turn, and this is how friendship works.

  The Correct And Proper Way To Feel

  –

  Wednesday, January 18, 2012

  “Is this how I’m supposed to feel now?”

  “I don’t know, I’ll check the manual.”

  “And?”

  “It says that you’re feeling the right way.”

  “What way is that?”

  “It says that there is no right way to feel but, right now, after something like this happens, you do need to feel however you’re feeling and that feeling this way, however you’re feeling, is healthy.”

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific.”

  “It has nothing to do with science.”

  “Does it say anything else?”

  “It says you’ll break something if you beat yourself up for the way you feel and that you won’t be able to feel differently until you’ve finished feeling this feeling.”

  “Ok. How long will that take?”

  “I don’t know. How do you feel?”

  The Backyard Hymns

  –

  Sunday, May 3, 2009

  You might not always like me, the things I do or the way I do them. But these are my things, this is the way I do them and I am me.

  The Translation Service

  –

  Friday, May 8, 2009

  And when I asked you how you’d been I meant I missed you more than I’ve ever missed anything before.

  The Skin I’m In

  –

  Thursday, January 13, 2011

  The Expanding Distance Between Two Points

  –

  Monday, January 30, 2012

  Making you regret what you did to me is not ‘me winning.’

  It’s everyone still losing.

  The Well Of Dreams

  –

  Thursday, July 30, 2009

  To wake up next to you. And confirm that the images I saw on the back of my eyelids seconds before, have all been made real.

  The Mechanics Of Puppetry

  –

  Thursday, October 22, 2009

  I guess I should say thank you, for cutting all my strings. But if it’s all the same to you, I wish you’d left my wings.

  The Church Of Broken Things

  –

  Tuesday, March 15, 2016

  A part of me wants to break the things you’re worried about breaking.

  Because I want you to see that broken things are nothing to worry about.

  The Breaking Of People

  –

  Thursday, January 5, 2012

  You can try being broken and you can try forgetting. All I know is I am no longer broken about the things I have forgotten.

  The Way We’re Measured

  –

  Tuesday, November 6, 2012

  My worry is that what you measure yourself with ends up defining you. You pour yourself into the thing that measures you and it defines you. And I just hope that one day you find out that you’re fuller when you measure yourself in love and people and moments, instead of things, adoration and money.

  The Cage Holds A Rare Blue Sun

  –

  Monday, August 11, 2014

  If you find them, tell them all you have said and heard before you found them.

  Tell them what rules you invented for yourself along the way. Explain how you could never do certain things and how jealous you are of them, for being able to do them.

  Tell them how happy you are that now, you can do those things, because they’re there.

  Tell them about the first thing that made you smile and the last thing that made you cry.

  If you find them, tell them everything.

  The Lights We All Once Were

  –

  Monday, October 3, 2011

  There is no pain.

  Just atoms becoming humans and picnics, lovers and stars. And then something else. And sometimes it feels like if the wind blew too hard, it’d take us all with it. You don’t have to close your eyes. There is no pain. Just molecules becoming the blood that pumps through your heart and the knot in your throat, the clouds above us and air inside your lungs. There’s nothing to cry about. There is no pain. Just the light from distant suns and flocks of birds. The sensation of time passing. Waves against the sky. Those shudders than run through your body, aren’t there. Your nose isn’t blocked.

  There is no pain.

  The Coldness Of Earth

  –

  Thursday, October 28, 2010

  And now you’re with someone else and I must go home, alone, to think about how long it takes to heal an alien heart.

  The World Leaning On Your Shoulder

  –

  Sunday, February 14, 2010

  You know all their stories but none of their stories know you.

  And you’ve felt all their pain but their pain has never bothered feeling you.

  So you take their medicine. Even though you’ve had too much medicine.

  The Carrington Event

  –

  Thursday, May 3, 2012

  Love proudly. Let it burn anything between you.

  The In-Between Things

  –

  Monday, November 2, 2015

  For a second, the wind blew so hard, it took the rain’s breath away and it could not fall, and you had the only hand I wanted to touch.

  The Shipwreck In My Head

  –

  Monday, March 1, 2010

  Everything you do, you pay for. So if you’re going to kiss me, you’d best be prepared to bleed.

  The Endless Night And All It Promises

  –

  Monday, June 4, 2012

  We can be beautiful and new forever. Give me forever and I’ll prove it.

  The Misconception

  –

  Thursday, September 4, 2008

  This was never meant to be about you. It was meant to be about you realising that it’s all about the people around you.

  The World Is Too Big

  –

  Wednesday, June 16, 2010

  All the space without you in it, is empty.

  The Truth Is Born In Strange Places

  –

  Thursday, August 5, 2010

  Joan of Arc came back as a little girl in Japan, and her father told her to stop listening to her imaginary friends.

  Elvis was born again in a small village in Sudan, he died hungry, age 9, never knowing what a guitar was.

  Michelangelo was drafted into the military at age 18 in Korea, he painted his face black with shoe polish and learned to kill.

  Jackson Pollock got told to stop making a mess, somewhere in Russia.

  Hemingway, to this day, writes DVD instruction manuals somewhere in China. He’s an old man on a factory line. You wouldn’t recognise him.

  Gandhi was born to a wealthy stockbroker in New York. He never forgave the world after his father threw himself from his office window, on the 21st floor.

  And everyone, somewhere, is someone, if we only give
them a chance.

  The Light That Shines When Things End

  –

  Wednesday, March 12, 2014

  I hope that in the future they invent a small golden light that follows you everywhere and when something is about to end, it shines brightly so you know it’s about to end.

  And if you’re never going to see someone again, it’ll shine brightly and both of you can be polite and say, “It was nice to have you in my life while I did, good luck with everything that happens after now.”

  And maybe if you’re never going to eat at the same restaurant again, it’ll shine and you can order everything off the menu you’ve never tried. Maybe, if someone’s about to buy your car, the light will shine and you can take it for one last spin. Maybe, if you’re with a group of friends who’ll never be together again, all your lights will shine at the same time and you’ll know, and then you can hold each other and whisper, “This was so good. Oh my God, this was so good.”

  The Words On The Tombstone

  –

  Friday, November 16, 2012

  Do practical things if you want your tombstone to read,

  “They were practical.”

  Do what makes sense if you think it should say,

  “Their life made sense.”

  Do what the world wants if you believe in the epitaph,

  “They did what the world wanted them to do.”

  But if you want it to read,

  “They lived every second they were given and touched the sky every chance they had, they burned and blazed in all the colours the eye can see and left a hole shaped like them in the world when they left.”

  Then do something else.

  The Fact That I’m Just Not Perfect

  –

  Friday, November 25, 2011

  (The highways are filled with the dead inside.)

  The highways are filled with people on their way to other people.

  (Look at the way they’re looking at you with glassy eyes.)

  Look at how lonely they are and desperate for another human.

  (The world needs to be burned down. Look at the news.)

  The world is filled with beautiful people. Look at the news.

  (Never apologise.)

  I’m sorry.

  (I am me.)

  No.

  You’re not.

  The Desire To Live Underwater Forever

  –

  Friday, July 13, 2012

  If I breathe you in and you breathe me out, I swear we can breathe forever. I swear I’ll find summer in your winter and spring in your autumn and always, hands at the ends of your fingers, arms at the ends of your shoulders and I swear, when we run out of forever, when we run out of air, your name will be the last word that my lungs make air for.

  The Singe

  –

  Wednesday, November 21, 2007

  The Place You Used To Live

  –

  Thursday, July 16, 2009

  There’s still a door here shaped like you. Boarded up, covered in chains and nails with paper stuffed in the locks.

  The Mouth Moves But No Sound Comes Out

  –

  Monday, March 10, 2014

  “You know I’m not really here, right?”

  “Can I talk to you anyway?”

  The Fate Of Those Born In Dirt

  –

  Monday, June 9, 2014

  When I end, I will end as a tree ends: as a fire, bleeding out the sunlight from every summer it lived.

  The Proven Regret

  –

  Tuesday, December 2, 2008

  There are days when I exist simply to prove you wrong about me.

  The Series

  –

  Tuesday, November 13, 2007

  There are moments of such pure, sublime, unparalleled perfection that they will force you to close your eyes and hold on to them as best you can.

  Life is a series of these moments. Everything else is just waiting for them.

  The Monsters I Miss

  –

  Monday, November 15, 2010

  And every single thing you ever did that bothered me, is every single thing I miss.

  The Voice In The Back Of My Heart

  –

  Friday, March 30, 2012

  When you have nothing left to say to me, say it anyway.

  The Cold Travels Fast

  –

  Thursday, October 15, 2009

  We all know what’s happening here because it’s happened before. Like an avalanche, there’s nothing we can do about it so we don’t even need to speak. But this time, if we’re covered by the ice and snow, I will hold you tight. I will keep you warm.

  The Point Past Peak Feelings

  –

  Tuesday, March 8, 2011

  I know you have feelings left somewhere. But they’re all so hard to reach.

  The Green Curtain

  –

  Sunday, December 12, 2010

  How many hearts would be invaded for the wrong reasons, if each time you said “I love you,” you meant it?

  The New Strangers

  –

  Tuesday, August 4, 2009

  We could leave. We could go anywhere. Everyone talks with an accent somewhere.

  The Future Of Text Books

  –

  Tuesday, November 8, 2011

  Should any child be reading this in a history book, you should know that we loved. I hope that hasn’t changed.

  The Shock Of Honesty

  –

  Tuesday, March 30, 2010

  Scare the world: Be exactly who you say you are and tell the truth.

  The Way It Isn’t

  –

  Wednesday, January 14, 2009

  I need you to give me the chance to take you for granted.

  The Stuff Of Science And Comets

  –

  Monday, January 5, 2009

  Someone you haven’t even met yet is wondering what it’d be like to know someone like you.

  The Occasional Silence

  –

  Thursday, August 20, 2009

  You can walk into a room and spot them. They seem fine when you talk to them but every now and again, across the room, you catch them looking off into the distance at an invisible point that maybe, they once reached. They laugh a little different. They hesitate a little more. Now they know what it feels like. And something about their eyes when they listen to music says,

  “Turn it up until my ears bleed. Let it be the last thing I hear.”

  The Pressure To The Wounded

  –

  Tuesday, January 13, 2009

  You know I just wouldn’t be human if I didn’t try and hold your hand as it disintegrated from the light of a thousand suns somewhere above Hiroshima. Or kiss the tears from your cheeks in Iraq, like the sweat from your brow in Zimbabwe. It isn’t in me not to try and lift the rubble crushing you in Gaza or hide you in Rwanda. Like a last hug in a building in New York or the water we shared in Afghanistan. More than the blood we mixed in Flanders or the sandy beach we trod in Normandy. Longer than the fires burned in Dresden or Soweto. I won’t let go of your hand.

  The Day You Shot Me In The Back Of The Head

  –

  Friday, February 17, 2012

  The sun rose like it does on any other day, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  I’d just made coffee and you’d come back from doing the groceries and I asked if you wanted some without turning my head to look at you, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  And I hit the floor so slowly and so hard and without any real warning, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  I knew we’d had our differences and our silences but I didn’t expect it to end like this, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  I thought there’d be more time, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  If I was still alive at that point, I ima
gine I’d smell cordite and sulphur filling the room and hear the echoes bouncing off the walls, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  I imagine there was a look of surprise on my face, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  I wonder if you thought you were being merciful by waiting until I wasn’t looking, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  I probably stared off at a distant point, while you gathered your things together and left, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  And I know that my body was there for a while and that the room was dark and that it was very quiet, because of what you’d done, on the day you shot me in the back of the head.

  But what you might not know, is that I got up.

  And washed my face.

  And the sun rose again.

  On the day after you shot me in the back of the head.

  The Celestial Companion

  –

  Thursday, April 29, 2010

  Still, courage, my friend.