16
" I am slowly learning to disregard the insatiable desire to be special. I think it began, the soft piano ballad of epiphanic freedom that danced in my head, when you mentioned that "Van Gogh was her thing" while I stood there in my overall dress, admiring his sunflowers at the art museum. And then again on South Street, while we thumbed through old records and I picked up Morrissey and you mentioned her name like it was stuck in your teeth. Each time, I felt a paintbrush on my cheeks, covering my skin in grey and fading me into a quiet, concealed background that hummed everything you've ever loved has been loved before, and everything you are has already been on an endless loop. It echoed in your wrists that I stared at, walking (home) in the middle of the street, and I felt like a ghost moving forward in an eternal line, waiting to haunt anyone who thought I was worth it. But no one keeps my name folded in their wallet. Only girls who are able to carve their names into paintings and vinyl live in pockets and dust bunnies and bathroom mirrors. And so be it, that I am grey and humming in the background. I am forgotten Sundays and chipped fingernail polish and borrowed sheets. I'm the song you'll get stuck in your head, but it will remind you of someone else. I am 2 in the afternoon, I am the last day of winter, I am a face on the sidewalk that won't show up in your dreams. And I am everywhere, and I am nothing at all. "
― Madisen Kuhn , eighteen years
19
" it’s easy to look back and romanticize the bits of time when you were first getting to know someone. both of you were looking at each other the same way you have to look at the sun when it’s in the middle of the sky; squinting
because it’s so bright. then once you get to know them deeply, you look at them the same way you look at the moon—you can stare at it for hours, mesmerized by its glow, and not say a word. in the beginning, you see an incomplete version of someone. as time goes on, you begin to see someone fully, and you no longer have to wear your polarized ray-bans, and somehow
that makes it feel less significant, when really, it’s the opposite, because now, it’s real. "
― Madisen Kuhn , Please Don't Go Before I Get Better
