L'AVVENTURA

It’s never too late to start beefing up your obituary.

Anonymous asked: Why do you love life?

The word for “love” and “to love” in latin-based languages comes from the word for soul. I’ve never gone a full twenty-four hours without seeing someone smile. Taking off my clothes is not fearful, because taking off my clothes means I will spend hours being held and kissed and caressed and told I am beautiful, whether I believe it or not. Of course, there are the comfort girls from China and little boys with guns and the man who lost his farm, but there are also the teenage girls in Lithuania writing poetry for the first time and the children in the Chihuahuan desert with dreams of red white and blue. When I asked him, “Why do you love life?” he replied, “Because you’re in it…I love being a part of something.”

Anonymous asked: How would you define perfection?

Perfection is waking up with an hour remaining before the alarm resonates, not too cold and not too warm, cocooned about yourself, with a light breeze on your face from an open window. Perfection is driving alone late at night in the summer, windows rolled down, and the song you need to hear comes on the radio, as if the universe has created a special little gift of destiny just for you. Perfection is falling asleep with his soft whispers in your ear, knowing you will never be alone. Perfection is the smell of fading sunshine and the electricity in the air just minutes before a good rain. Perfection is sitting on the porch in the sun reading Gatsby for the twentieth time and still finding those expertly hidden gems. Perfection is that little slice of paradise you find within the rolls of bread and the sand between your toes and the flutter of her eyes when she sleeps. Perfection is the treasures we have been blessed with that we too often neglect to acknowledge.

When ego is lost, limit is lost. You become infinite, kind, beautiful.

writingsforwinter:

It’s strange to think that the person you’re going to marry is somewhere out there, eating lunch in a subway station or spilling coffee on their dress slacks only five minutes before they have to leave the house for work, or looking in the mirror and hating what they see. Who knows how many mouths they’ve kissed, how many people they’ve slept with, but eventually, like a Ferris wheel returning to its starting point, they will always point back to you.

There are so many cities in this world and so many buildings, thousands of skyscrapers with people in them like little tiny ants, staring down from their glass windows and wishing they could be somewhere else. 10,000 daughters smoking one last cigarette with their dying mothers after so many years of saying no; they fall back into their old habits because they know there’s only one more time to do the things they loved with their parents. Their parents, who will be dead and in the ground, and sometimes these daughters or these sons have to pre-plan their parents’ funerals and pick out the right color of caskets, when really, who will even notice what color the casket is? It could be midnight blue or hot pink and the mourners would be too teary-eyed to tell the difference.

And so many teenagers making love for the first time in hotel beds or on rooftops, awkwardly, sweetly, some forgetting condoms, others making the conscious decision not to use them. Clumsy at first; they’ll be afraid of showing one another their skin, but soon they’ll fall into a rhythm, like the ocean waves figuring out how to touch the shore gently after so many months of tsunamis.

Some of those teenagers will get pregnant and go on to have round, glowing bellies, and their children will grow inside them like pearls inside the shell of an oyster, lives going in and out of the world all the time. And someone somewhere is getting drunk at a party or getting stoned alone in a guest room, heavy with the weight of the world. Sometimes the world is just a cross that we all have to bear, a cross so heavy that we bend beneath it, our backs low to the ground. Someone sitting in a car by themselves at night, underneath a streetlight, closing their eyes and wishing to be somewhere else.

There is someone right now who could be Skyping you or holding your hand or traveling halfway across the world just to see you, or looking up at an approaching asteroid at the exact same moment you are. There are millions and billions of combinations and intersection points for every human being, and at every given intersection point, there is the possiblity of you and one another human being.

So many bodies that could have come together like puzzle pieces but never found their way to one another, so many hands that could have touched but didn’t.

You are completely at choice who you will be today in your interactions with others. Compassionate, kind, giving and forgiving will create one set of probabilities; angry, judgmental, critical and defensive will create another one altogether.