20 Moving And Powerful Passages From Thought Catalog’s Female Writers

Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime in the future. That would be nice; it’s where my heart and mind went to, when I found out that you were being welcomed back to that place that isn’t here. Or maybe I’ll forget you soon. But I do know that when I come across certain places and things, I’ll think of you. And I know that when I’m out and about, at least for a while, I’ll still be wretchedly looking for you; hoping to see you again. You left and you were always going to, but I still have sand in my shoes. And I’m not ready to dust it off just yet. Kovie Biakolo

But in hope, the ridiculous is allowed. Because if you don’t hope when all the chips are down, when everything around you is disastrous and despairing, do you really hope at all? Kovie Biakolo

Blogs, the journals we always wanted. Permanent places where the handwriting would never fade, records you could not lose in a fire. We wanted a diary that could talk back, validate us. We were blogging ourselves to live — to extend beyond the boxes in our closets and add to the pile of proof that we exist. When they’re erased by a company abruptly and without warning, it’s something of a new-age arson. Your records still exist somewhere, of course — this is what you were promised, what you put here stays forever — but ashes don’t make for very good reading material, you know? Stephanie Georgopulos

On rare occasions, we’ll still align. I will pass through your shadow and bask in your sunlight; my face awash in gold and red and I’ll remember the way things were. But lunar eclipses, they’re few and far between and they’re not enough to save us. Stephanie Georgopulos

You can’t let go because you’re worried that if you do, what you’re so desperately hoping for will fall apart. I have news for you. You’re tearing it down yourself.  Make way for the bigger, the better, the reckoning, the miraculous and the beautiful. It’s ready for you when you are. Brianna Wiest

But sometimes you can love someone a lot even if you have to leave for a place where they can’t go. It doesn’t mean you love them any less, it’s not even sad, sometimes love is something to be had and sometimes love is something to be left. Heidi Liu

You are a sea and I am a sea. Beside me, I see the body of your water and throw my own against yours. But like that magic place off the Alaskan coast, from our meeting erupts a ridge of separation. We are seas of different densities and we cannot join, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of years we lay side by side, our point of contact will be fleeting, will be turbulent. Heidi Liu

Of course, you never really forget anyone, but you certainly release them. You stop allowing their history to have any meaning for you today. You let them change their haircut, let them move, let them fall in love again. And when you see this person you have let go, you realize that there is no reason to be sad. The person you knew exists somewhere, but you are separated by too much time to reach them again. Chelsea Fagan

I want to see you make a difference in this cruel and beautiful world, because I know that you can. And I know that you will. I want to see you. But most of all, I want you to see how much you have helped me see. Sarah McCarten

You weren’t there; but you were. You were in my bed, and then in my shower, then in the subway with me on the way to work and all day you sat beside me until we rode the subway home together, ate dinner, and climbed back into bed where you kissed me that morning; it was so real. I didn’t dream of you again. Kat George

I am bad because I bring out something you know is true about yourself and you don’t like. Something you need to blame on me, (a jezebel, a harpy, a bad influence) rather than admit that it lives inside you. Deep down, you know what you really are. And you can never be with me, because I also know what you really are. She will make you better. She will never know. And it is easier to soak her up, pretend that she is you, take her light — than it is to admit you wanted to hurt me. Gaby Dunn

If this theory holds, well, by the law of averages, there had to be one universe — just this one — where we don’t end up together. Here and now just happens to be it. If you think of it this way, nothing is our fault. So see, that explains everything. We’re not together anymore because of the multiverse.If you’re sad, do like I do and just think of the other ‘verses. The ones where I believe in love and where I don’t hate myself and where I never feel the need to kamikaze relationships. A universe where we can have nice things. It’s helpful, right? Because you could have loved me forever. And maybe in another universe, I let you. Gaby Dunn

I thought of holding your hand, feeling your blood and my blood pulse between our fingers, and what it would take to do such a thing, walk through a wall. I think it must be like traveling to the edge of the universe, an unfathomable journey of a hundred years or more. Worth it, maybe, to see what’s out there. Worth giving up a lifetime of everything we know and love, just to glimpse it, though it may not even welcome us, though it may destroy us. Violet Young

I try to see myself as just one element in our cosmos, one piece of a mobile hanging from an invisible string. Something is holding us up and holding us together. Far be it from me to force us closer than we already are. Violet Young

But to be in there, on there, in the Facebook chat, is to desire to not really live in an actual definable place on the time-space continuum. It is a desire to live in the ether with another body, floating through black unquantifiable space, a vastness so great even our two pairs of perfectly sharp eyes can’t get a handle on it, holding each other so as to not be gradually choreographed apart by anti-gravity. Violet Young

So often you produce my dreams, and in them, logistics go where I wish emotions would. Time is planned, broken up into increments, when the point of dreams is supposed to be to indulge the mind with an elastic sense of time and more possibility than reality allows. You say things like, I have to go, and I try to wake myself up to prevent having to witness your leaving. Violet Young

Across a deserted street I wish you the best and I hope that maybe, just maybe, I helped you grow a little too. That you will remember me someday with a sort of soft, grateful, fondness and that I can be a person you never regret knowing. You look up as you open the door to your car, face turning instinctively in my direction, and I wonder if you know it’s me. I smile a little to myself and go back inside. Brianne McDonald

They’re still out there. Someone’s still out there. Whether you end up with them or not, it doesn’t matter. Five, ten, twenty years from now, you’ll wake up in your bed, and you’ll either be alone, or you’ll be with someone, but at some point, that person, that hypothetical, whoever they were or are or will be, they’ll still exist, whether you fucked them up or you won them over or you haven’t met them yet. Someone will be there. Or their absence will. Jasmine Gonzalez

A conversation that seems light, but a feeling that’s almost heavy. Not suffocating, but intense and emotional, and I know I never tell you this but it’s always scared me too. You’re usually uncomfortable. I’m usually pensive, trying to choose my words so fucking carefully. You’ll ask something serious then, and you’ll fix your eyes on me, and I’ll look at you, and I’ll lean in a little. And that’s when I’ll know. That it’s still there. I’ll know just how real it still is. Gabrielle Morbitzer

But yet, the people who often flip our worlds upside down are the ones that shouldn’t know anything about us, but yet somehow they do. And in a matter of seconds, a stranger can change your life in ways that someone you know for 15 years never can. Jen Glantz