I’m someone who deeply wants to understand the people I love and to be understood by them, and I’m always stymied by how challenging that is. My whole life I’ve longed for someone who I could talk about everything with, who could listen to what I feel just as I’ve written it above, the love and the beauty and the confusion of each day, and understand it completely. I know this is an impossible dream—that there is no such thing as instant understanding—but I return to it in moments of frustration.

This broke my heart because it is still so me 💔

We could never agree about anything. I was constantly trying to explain myself and he was, as I said above, on a separate moon of a separate planet. None of my explanations ever coalesced into understanding, though I tried and tried. That experience taught me how painful it can be to live in a world filled with gaps in understanding, but there was also something—cathartic?—in trying. Kerouac: Soon I'll find the right words, they'll be very simple.