I don’t see a point in obsessing about other people’s lives. You see, there was time when I lived mine vicariously. I nitpicked what other people wore. I availed of any opportunity to bring others down when I could. And I invested so much emotion in the superficial lives of celebrities and public people: what they were clothing themselves, what they were buying, what they were using, who they were dating. I wanted everything they had, and I wanted it without use of patience. Next thing I knew, my life became less mine, and more “othered” so to speak. And this adamant falseness made me lonely soon enough because I recognized this attitude was not feasible for contentment. I could pretend I wasn’t sad. I could read all the inspirational materials known to mankind. But it didn’t make sense - this disparity between external and internal. That’s when I told myself to fuck off other people’s lives, if they weren’t fucking with mine. And you know what, it made me happy as soon as I stopped caring about what people did with their lives, and what they would think of me. So long as they weren’t shoving down my throat how I lived mine, I simply stopped paying attention to how they lived theirs.
via an online confidant
After all, everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
Gertrude Stein
Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.
The Winter of the Air

Source: kalynroseanne

Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man