Jb If He Was Given Responsibility Over Titling The Chapters:

someone said that they miss Jude, but I don't miss him I take him everywhere I go, I let him wander in my mind all the time, it's like I have him with me in some form or the another everywhere

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

me because i was actually not able to breathe by the end 🩷

Me back to when I finished Dear comrade AND Lispenard street in ONE sitting

june 12 today. i wish jude knew how loved he really was

jude in dear comrade:

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?”

i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always me i was always

"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

x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.

——

i took this photo today whilst visiting Lispenard Street <3