I’ve realised I only turn to my diary when the days are bad and if this isn’t confirmation that human pain is the brush and pen of art, poetry and literature I don’t know what is.

The smell of the earth after the rain. The soft, chilly breeze of an early autumn morning. The crunch of the leaves as you step on them to begin or end your day. The jacket you have been carrying with you all day and put on late at night when it was finally cold enough to wear it. The crispy air of a winter morning. The cozy smell of a freshly cooked meal that awaits you after an exhausting day. The sound of collective laughter. The empty yet intense feeling once you reach the last page of a book. The relief and the pride in finishing a time consuming task. The animals you come across outside that make you smile enough to continue with your day brand new. The sound of the ocean as it attacks the steady rocks. The realization that you are alive. The sense of relief when you shed those tears you had been keeping inside you in the form of negative, overwhelming feelings. The eye contact you kept with a stranger you will never encounter again. The lingering feeling of a movie you just watched that may have impacted you permanently. The realization of everything’s temporariness, even your own’s.

Life.

“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free in delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?”

— Rose Kennedy

— Fire and Ice, Robert Frost (1874-1963)

“Too much joy, I swear,

…is lost in our desperation to keep it”

— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

Dialogue between Orpheus and Eurycice

I have lived a thousand lives and I have loved a thousand loves.

I’ve walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time.

Because I read.

— George R. R. Martin

Troy (2004)

[Text ID: Everything is more beautiful/because we are doomed./You will never be lovelier/than you are now./We will never be here again.]

Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.

M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains