Ashe Vernon Quotes

This is the story of how I never stopped running. This is the story of how,
when the wolves knocked, I met them at the door and I became the beast, instead.

This is a story of survival.
It is your story,
even when you feel like that word
does not belong to you.

Your ribcage never meant to hurt you.
Your windpipe doesn't know how to be pretty,
but she knows how to howl -
and here, I'd like to take a moment
to submit a formal apology to my soft parts
because they kept me warm
when I was trying to freeze to death,
and I hated them for it. An apology
for a starvation that went deeper than my skin.
One for the strongest skeleton I will ever own
and how I kept using the word girl against it.
Or how I turned words like beautiful into shapes
I could contort myself into. I didn't mean
to compare myself to faces I can't have.
Or spend years trying to carve myself,
like Michelangelo's angels, from the marble -
forgetting what it is to be skin instead of stone.
I let myself be afraid. I was taught to be.
When you learn you are only as good
as your beauty routine, you forget
how to define yourself by anything else.

What they don't tell you about the illusion
is that I am as much lion as I am lion tamer.
And I got good at inflicting pain the same way I got good
at soothing it.
This, we call unfortunate,
but inevitable.

I was a wolf, and they dressed me
in sheepskin

Listen, in a few hours
our little world will
turn herself right-side-up-again,
and you will forget about
all the ways this lonely night
sang you watered-down blues and
your hands will start to make sense again.

You think you've seen every ugly corner
of this whole rotten world, but listen:
There is an infinite number
of things we don't know and,
statistically speaking,
at least half of them
are probably
very, very, beautiful.

There are poets who sing you to sleep
and poets who ready you for war
and I want to be both.

When he says
He doesn't love you anymore,
Roll your shoulders back
And look him in the eye
Even when it feels like your ribs
Are breaking inward, like spider legs.
When he digs up old aches
That he swore he forgave you for,
Smile
And ask him why he didn't leave you sooner.
Ignore the way the words feel like sandpaper
Running all the way up your throat to your mouth.
When he blames you
For mistakes that wear his face,
Do not scream.
Do not cry.
Tell him that there are boys
Who would be proud to say they'd loved you.
Tell him that in two years
You won't even remember his name
And don't let him see the way you can taste your own lie.
When he leaves
Ignore the howling in your blood
And do not get up after him.
Not even to lock the door.
Do not, do not
Do not.
Smell his shirts when you box them up
To give them back.
Not one.
Swear off dating when you realize
You're chasing ghosts that wear his smile.
It's okay to cry over him.
It's even okay to forgive him.
But do not go back to him.
If he did not know how to love you the first time,
He won't know how to do it the next.

First,
quit picking old wounds
and going for walks in the aches
and pains you already made it through -
you call it healing, but
it sounds like a good way
to take a haunting home with you.