'The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places.'
It took me three days to stop crying for any length of time. After that, it wasn't about what I felt but about what I didn't. I don't know that there's a word in English for feeling so keenly the absence of something you never knew you were missing. Grief, perhaps; but that's not quite right. Today, I am finding it difficult to be poetic; there's a certain clinical distance that comes from sweeping up all the shattered parts of yourself. Putting them back into a box and leaving them for the one person who can remember how they're supposed to fit together. That leaves me with facts, and the facts are these. I am deeply in love. The Atlantic Ocean is far too wide. And I miss the boy I love. I don't know how to put it any more plainly than that.
This is new for me. It has made me pragmatic, and selfish. One of the things love is good for is making you feel part of something important, something deeply meaningful. And what that is, is the freedom of a bookish teenager learning that he can write his own stories. I don't need an analogy to explain this to myself. I don't want to be Tristan or Isolde, because I want to be myself. For the first time in a long time, that feels like something worth doing. I'm still not quite an optimist. Happy endings are not our birthright. They need work, and persistence, and the kind of strength you find at the broken places. But I feel capable. I want EC back. And if anyone tries to stop that happening, I will go through them like a woodchipper through a bushel of puppies.
...there, I managed to get one joke in there.