“Refrain from giving pieces of yourself to those who get close, for people leave, and gifts that are given cannot be returned.”

You’ll roam the world and come to realize: It’s all in you, to be free or not to be.

We reshape our memories into uglier versions because it’s hard to forget them while they’re still beautiful.

This is face blindness, but not really it. Among all the faces I see, I could only see yours.

I’ve always had a fear of endings, but it comes as relief to me that among all the dying things, I am one too.

Where once there were a few houses between us, now there are seas.

I close my eyes and I see you. I open them, and I’m blind.

You float underneath my eyelids – a dream I never seem to get enough of.

Of all the lies I’ve lived, and all the lies I’ve been told, the lies I told myself hurt the most.

If there’s anything I’ve learnt so far, it’s that to love others, you should give them space to breathe.

And it scares me that if I ever get my wings, I might not know where to fly to.

I am grieving a connection that never really happened, a dance of souls that only lasted one day.

Maybe that’s why it was so easy for you to break me, you can always tear the pages of an open book.

When she laughs, her soul floats outside her body and I can touch it.

I wish I can still hold your hand like I used to. I wish you were still alive.

You touch me and a thousand different particles come alive beneath my skin.

I shed skin after skin, seeking my true colors, expecting a rainbow or a stripe of black, but all I get are maps of red. We are all human underneath.

Depression is the way my eyes have learnt how to close more than open.

When I was a kid, I was like everyone else: afraid of getting nuked. We had drills in school – Sweden was very close to the Soviet Union. There was definitely a lot of tension.

I wrote many poems about her and held her so close to my heart that she did not even knew a place there.

You keep me at a distance when all I want to have you is close.

The greater a man’s talents, the more marked his idiosyncracies. Yet in the provinces originality is considered perilously close to lunacy.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Sorrows, as storms, bring down the clouds close to the earth; sorrows bring heaven down close; and they are instruments of cleansing and purifying.

I don’t want to show my body to the ones, who often close their eyes, when it’s time to praise the beauty of my mind and soul.