You Have Become So Delicate And Vulnerable, As If You're Living Without A Skin

Despite [her] demented laugh, she may actually be an uncommonly sad girl. Doesn’t a person who laughs a lot also cry a lot?

Dazai Osamu, Pandora’s Box

On Friendship.

When a physicist falls in love :)

Richard Feynman's love letter to his deceased wife, 1946.

Amal El-Mohtar, from The Honey Month; “Day 27: Leatherwood Honey”

[Text ID; “I value you. I will love you hard and strong because I suffer in loving you, and will make you suffer with me.”]

from Loneliness: coping with the gap where friends used to be by Olivia Laing for The Guardian

[Text ID: Last night, I ate dinner with my friend Jenny. In real life, on a warm London evening, forking up aubergine from the same plate. We laughed, shared family news, told each other the things we’d been worrying over. At home, alone in my study, they’d felt insurmountable, a sign that something was irredeemably wrong with me. Under the gentle scrutiny of my friend, they diminished to a normal size: just the grit of everyday traffic with other humans. I walked home feeling buoyant, nearly invincible. I need my friends. I bet you need yours.]

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love [transcript in ALT]

Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

“Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes Loving me in secret.”

— James Wright, “Milkweed,” from The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1972)

Mahmoud Darwish, “Viewpoint,” trans. Fady Joudah, in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, edited by Ilya Kaminsky [ID in alt text]