Me When “maybe He’s That Grey Cat That Purrs Everytime I Reach My Hand Out To It”

"I was dismayed by how casually cruel or dismissive we are of people who find life too much to bear. The words that we use like 'they're a coward', 'they gave up', 'they gave in', are so unforgiving of what it actually means to be alive with a mind that torments you and a body you hate."

– Hanya Yanagihara, in an interview about "A Little Life

It just downed on me that Jude died in the summer.

“Jude’s season”

*tosses some Jude fanart @ you and then scuttles away*

Jude with cigarette

not going to lie a specific scene in the book that really fucking hits me sometimes and i need to double down is when someone tells harold jude is beautiful . i just can’t. there’s something so solemn about it

one of the ways i am like jude st francis is that if there isn’t a lock on the door or i’m unable to close it i WILL have a panic attack😆

the parallels in this book make me insane but yk when Harold was talking w Liesl for the first time in sixteen years and discovered she had been doing the same thing he had, which was seeing Jacob’s essence in the faces of students or just passerbys in the street.

“Only to realize later that she had imagined they might be our son, alive and well and away from us, no longer ours, but walking freely through the world, unaware that we might have been searching for him all this time”

And then later on, after Jude’s death, Harold finds that in everything he sees, he sees him. He seeks his son’s face once again, finding comfort in the idea that he might be somewhere off in the world, walking free, without pain and without grief, but he is no longer his and Julia’s.

Was that the price that Harold and Julia paid to let Jude be freed? That he might be off somewhere else, no longer really Jude but something or someone else that does not carry the pain or grief that Jude carried with him? But in return, he would no longer be Harold and Julia’s? They would never be able to reach him again, but he is free now.

“And if a child can no longer be comforted, is it my job to give him permission to leave?”

“a little life is ableist”

SHUT UP SHUT IP

as a disabled person when i read “people who had been made disabled felt they had been robbed of something” i had to put the fucking book down and recollect BECAUSE HANYA GOT IT SO CORRECT SO SHUT THE FUCK UP

i feel like jude would love easter. he would make cakes and gift eggs. HIM AND THE BOYS PAINTING EGGS. fresh daffodils in the apartment… god

jude wondering if he did something wrong because willem didn't hold him one time. all i can say is i relate