As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many sizes and shapes. And pleasure, love, compassion, fulfillment—these things do not leak out of holes of any size. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment. Though there will always be days, like the weather, when the loss returns fresh and full and we will reside within it once again, for a while. Loss creates a greater overall surface area within a person. You expand as a result of it. Though it may well feel like the opposite. If you lose something or someone that is enormously important to you, there can be an overwhelming desire to stop living. To have no new experiences. To shut down. Huge loss resets you in a way to an earlier time, before you had what it is that you lost. But all you have had, all you have lived remains in you as a part of your structure now.
augusten burroughs (via gatheringbones)

(via voremeseymour-deactivated201606)

Source: gatheringbones