Marisa Donnelly

We think we have to be women and men who are tough on the outside and soft on the inside, who act one way but think another. We believe this makes us attractive, to be complicated. Makes us worth the chase, worth the discovery of what’s beneath the layers. But maybe we really don’t need the layers at all.

“Nature’s way of tricking people into reproducing.”

As I watched the lights, I couldn’t help but cry. Cry for the sounds and the absence of them. Cry for the places I’d been and called home. Cry for the hands I’d held, the hearts I’d broken, and the people I would one day leave behind.

Despite the odds, love conquers all.

You are my security, my savior. You are what I’ve always had, always cared for. Yet despite that, I still wish for you, day after day.

You have suddenly started to question everything. From your college major to your friend group to where you should live post-graduation and even as far as whether or not you’ve recently picked up a gluten allergy??!? Could that be a thing??

Even if it seems like the entire world is against you, even if some days you feel purposeless, even if sometimes you stare at the clock on the wall and wonder what it all means. What you are doing matters.

“Treat me like a human being rather than a romantic conquest.”

She understands the complexities of the male mind.

If someone starts a nasty rumor about you, you get suuuuuper anxious because WTF THAT’S NOT TRUE AND I CAN’T LET THE WORLD THINK THAT ABOUT ME!!!!!!

We are all broken, and that’s strangely beautiful.

I want your eyes open and bright, not red-rimmed and disguised with a loopy smile. Not a body slumped on a couch and an arm draped heavy across my shoulders. Not a kiss you won’t remember, still wet on my lips.

This isn’t a choice I made, but an unconscious feeling. I cannot love you because my heart is still caught in the mess of someone else. I cannot love you because I am too selfish, too determined, too content in being the girl on her own.

Nickelodeon: You were a wild child, identifying most with the characters in the Rugrats, Wild Thornberrys, or Hey Arnold.

A phone was just a thing. It was replaceable. But the memories, the laughs, the dancing, the friends that surrounded me and the strangers I hadn’t yet met—those things weren’t.

We don’t. We communicate in garbled languages, in words typed and misconstrued behind keyboards and screens. We text what we mean and then we erase it. And we write what we think we should say, what the world wants us to.

“You would look better with bigger boobs / butt.”

There are books to be read, music to be listened to, voices and memories to soak in. There are people and places and entire worlds outside your front door, just waiting to be discovered. And you can find yourself in all of it.