Saikrishna Tipparapu

“Falling in love is easy. Falling in love with the same person repeatedly is extraordinary.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading

“Anna, you miss him.”
“All the time. I still can’t believe he’s gone.” The words come out in a whoosh, tasting funny in my mouth. No matter how many times I say them, they still feel like a garbled, impossible language. My chest hurts, and I have to hold my breath to keep from inhaling a deep sob.
“He was more than your best friend.”
I nod absently, forgetting myself for a moment, forgetting that I’m talking to Jayne and not my journal.
“I – I mean, he was like a brother to me. You know, like Frankie. Well, she’s the sister. I mean–”
Jayne reaches for my hands across the table, shaking her head softly. “Sweetheart, when you say Matt’s name, you have the same look in your eyes that he’d get whenever he’d say yours.”
― Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer

“Getting an education might be difficult, but it makes life easy. Being uneducated might be easy, but it makes life difficult.”
― Debasish Mridha

“Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn’t even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know.
But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don’t want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don’t want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don’t want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes.
I don’t want to be the dead boy’s best-friend-turned-something-else.
Or the really supportive neighbor friend.
Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.”
― Sarah Ockler, Twenty Boy Summer