There’s so much more to life than finding someone who will want you, or being sad over someone who doesn’t. There’s a lot of wonderful time to be spent discovering yourself without hoping someone will fall in love with you along the way, and it doesn’t need to be painful or empty. You need to fill yourself up with love. Not anyone else. Become a whole being on your own. Go on adventures, fall asleep in the woods with friends, wander around the city at night, sit in a coffee shop on your own, write on bathroom stalls, leave notes in library books, dress up for yourself, give to others, smile a lot. Do all things with love, but don’t romanticize life like you can’t survive without it. Live for yourself and be happy on your own. It isn’t any less beautiful, I promise.

— Emery Allen  (via countingsouls)

Are you talking to yourself? Yes I’m talking to my selves.
Sometimes we’re just an echo of what we meant to say.

— Richard Jackson, from “Is This the Person to Whom I Am Speaking,” Out of Place: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)

You and I, they think we are alike;
our huge opposing views, they cannot identify.
The way we do behave – like rocks crashing against
the waves – ceases to show and remains unseen, and so,
they have no knowledge of what is underneath.

Truth is, you and I, we do not coincide;
our way of thinking was never synchronized.
The likeness of us two, I’ve long enough dismissed;
no matter what they insist, we just don’t coexist.

— We don’t.