Accidentally Like A Martyr Quotes

We made mad love
shadow love
random love
and abandoned love.
Accidentally like a martyr.
The hurt gets worse, and the heart gets harder. ~ Warren Zevon

There is that moment in time where you have to realize you have to let go of the rope... ~ K. Farrell St. Germain

For the record, I would like to point out that it is NOT being obsessive to memorize a boy's schedule so that you can accidentally bump into him. It is called being efficient. ~ Jess Rothenberg

I'm smart in some ways- pretty good vocabulary, solid at math – but I am definitely the stupidest smart person there is… I was going to be the worst friend in the history of dying girls… Because I don't really have a moral compass and I need to rely on (Earl) for guidance, or else I might accidentally become like a hermit or a terrorist or something. How fucked up is that. ~ Jesse Andrews

You are such a piece of shit," I yell into the quiet cab, slapping the horn accidentally. It makes a sound like a wounded duck. "Don't you talk back to me! You're this close to going to car heaven at the junk yard. ~ M. Leighton

All Connell's classmates have identical accents and carry the same size MacBook under their arms. In seminars they express their opinions passionately and conduct impromptu debates. Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority to his fellow students, as if he had upgraded himself accidentally to an intellectual level far above his own, where he had to strain to make sense of the most basic premises. He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realized that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debate about books they had no read. He understand now that his classmates are not like him. It's easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they're not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he'll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try. ~ Sally Rooney

The silky swirl of his tongue in the hollow of her navel sent fire licking through her veins. Hazily aware of the area his mouth was traversing, she stirred beneath him.
Not seeming to realize just where he was kissing her, Matthew persisted, sliding lower until Daisy let out a muffled yelp and pushed hard at his encroaching head.
"What is it?" he asked, rising to his elbows.
Crimson with mortification, Daisy could hardly bring herself to explain. "You were too close to my…well, you accidentally…"
As her voice faded, understanding dawned in Matthew's eyes. Quickly he bent his head to hide his expression, and a tremor ran through his shoulders. He replied with great care, still looking away from her. "It wasn't accidental. I meant to do that."
Daisy was astonished. "But you were going to kiss me right on my - " She broke off as his gaze met hers, laughter dancing in his blue eyes.
He wasn't embarrassed at all - he was amused.
"You're not shocked, are you?" he asked. "I thought you were well read."
"Well, no one would ever write about something like that."
He shrugged, his eyes glowing. "You're the literary authority."
"You're making fun of me," she said.
"Just a little," he whispered, and kissed her stomach again. Her legs jerked against his restraining hands. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite - that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that it is best for them to stay in the dark climate-controlled airport chapel of your mind, that if they're released into the air and light they will be affected in a way that alters them, like film accidentally exposed. ~ Peter Cameron

Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened--and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.
"Two litres!" I said. "Where has it all gone?"
They'd vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don't ask me why: it just did. It was as though I'd just witnessed a miracle: matter--these two litres of liquid--becoming un-matter--not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He'd taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christian martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated--elated and inspired.
"If only..." I started, but paused.
"What?" he asked.
"If only everything could..."
I trailed off. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:
"Thank you."
Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught--and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin. ~ Tom McCarthy

But eventually I nudged the old bandages in the corner toward me. Once I had them in my hands, I unwound them to their full length.
"What are you doing with those?" Roden asked, "You're not injured."
"The vigils are forbidden from harming me tonight. Vargan was very clear that I wasn't to come out tomorrow looking like a martyr." My grin widened." But don't worry, Avenia already fell for this trick once before. They love it."
"That's your trick?" Roden asked. "Can't you take this seriously?"
"If you understood what Vargan's men did to me, you'd know exactly how serious I am."
"Hush now," I said. "Imogen needs to sleep, I need to think and you need to ... let me think. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Once I accepted the fact that I was bad luck, I shied away from group activities. And groups. And activities. I started spending a lot of time in my room, tucked under my covers reading books. There's only so much damage a book can do, and I wasn't worried about hurting myself. Accidentally hurting yourself is way better than hurting other people.
Sure, I got lonely for a while. But getting invited to slumber parties just wasn't worth the stress of wondering if I might accidentally burn down the house with my flat iron or be the only survivor of a freak sleepover massacre. And loneliness is just like everything else - if you endure it long enough, you get used to it. ~ Paula Stokes

Executing a criminal often makes a martyr of him. Once he's dead and gone, people all too often forget the crimes he's committed and start to see a more sanitised version. A person like that starts to be seen as a victim. ~ John Flanagan

So what's your story?" Maddie didn't try to hide the singsong lilt of her voice as she spoke. She didn't want to. She'd learned at a very young age that nothing annoyed manly men more than girly girls, and if Maddie had one talent, it was truly exceptional girliness.
"Shut up and be quiet," Stefan snapped.
"That's just a tad redundant, FYI."
"Shut up!" he hissed near her ear.
Maddie couldn't help but shift her weight from foot to foot, almost pacing in place. She was careful of the ice and the snow, though. No use falling to the ground and having Stefan accidentally pull the trigger.
"You really do give a lot of orders," she told him.
He tightened his grip. "I'm the one with the gun."
"Well, yeah. Sure. Technically. But I'm the one with the winning personality, and that should count for something."
"You should be scared," he said in the same tone a movie villain might use to say You should be dead when the hero materializes five years later, hungry for vengeance.
Stefan was confused, and Maddie couldn't blame him.
So she turned back and shrugged. "Maybe. But I don't think you're a bad guy."
He let her go and spun her around, grabbing Logan's unzipped coat and pulling her closer.
"I. Have. The. Gun," he reminded her.
Maddie smiled and pulled away. "And I have Taylor Swift's signature scent. Doesn't make me a pop star. It just makes me smell like Taylor Swift, which isn't as great as it sounds because, to a bear, ~ Ally Carter

When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city. ~ Sara Paretsky

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me.

I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste.

I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria.

I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I ~ Boris Fishman

Waiting for a book to be published is like having a baby. It would be nine months before we heard the patter of tiny pages trotting through the letter box, and the bookcase shuffled it's shelves in boredom and I was a martyr to morning sickness. ~ Deric Longden

Here he is, the epitome of self-improvement, like I knew a more primitive and lesser form of him. He wasn't a full person then, but now he is complete.Not completed by me, not at all. He's making damn sure I don't accidentally think that. And he smiles at me, the way you'd smile at a stranger, or at someone you know you're never going to see again, awkward but comforting like the encounter was not as unpleasant as it could have been. I want to snatch a hold of his shoulders and ask if he's fucking kidding me. If he's done. Because it seems to me like he is, but he's not allowed to be if I'm not. ~ Anna Green

It is a strange phrase, 'falling in love,'" said one of the princesses in the tower. Tears stood out on her cheeks, and even these were pretty, reflecting the blue sky above her. "It sounds like something you do accidentally, by yourself. But isn't someone else always to blame? They should call it strangling in love. Walloped in love. Knocked-out-of-nowhere in love. ~ Lauren Oliver

I love beauty. But I like the beauty accidentally, not dished up, served up on a platter. ~ Wole Soyinka

He stared back at me so blatantly I wanted to smack him. "I know. Like I said, that… was never my intention. It was an accident." My mouth dropped open. "Did you slip and fall on my bed? Because I don't understand how you've accidentally ended up there." Red stained the tips of his cheeks. "I check the outside, and then I check the inside just to be sure. Hybrids can get into your house, Katy, as you already know. So could Daedalus if they wanted." What would he have done if Daemon had been there? Then it struck me and I felt sick all over again. "How long do you watch at night?" He shrugged. "A couple of hours." So he'd have known if Daemon had come over most of the time, and the rest was just sheer dumb luck. Part of me wished he'd tried it just once when Daemon was there. He wouldn't be walking right for months. There was a good chance he may leave this stairwell with a limp. Blake seemed to sense where my mind went. "After I checked inside your house, I… I don't know what happened. You have bad dreams." I wondered why. I had perverts sleeping in the bed with me. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

I simmer in the half-light of a stoop, raising beers under a pompadour on the first brisk night, pressure more potent than any barometer can read. To see your hand to the tramp of feet is a way to measure strangers. To feel your hair on my finger accidentally is common sense, a way of leading you to me as the watch moves. We return to our bed through the bakery smells of daybreak, sky palling, empty of jets. The schedule is suspended, then resumes like gray dead hands in the east, and I want you never to die. ~ John Godfrey

The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat - & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you - so don't play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr - accept the fact that you're a criminal & be prepared to act like one. ~ Hakim Bey

I couldn't articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it - "Hey Nigger, raise the boom" or "Fetch me a level, Nigger" - I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted, "Nigger, move to the next row." I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested.
I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others - because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. ~ Tara Westover

Hold on a second, partner. I've got a few questions, like, where are the rest of your clothes? And why doesn't she have any shoes?" He pointed to Luna's bare toes. She had an answer for that. "My boyfriend here is trying to protect my reputation. Such a sweetie." She giggled. "See, the real reason the stove accidentally stayed on is I might have accidentally grabbed and turned a knob when Jeoff was taking me like a wild beast on the counter. ~ Eve Langlais

As we're leaving the King's Arms Hotel after Sunday lunch, I watch a beautiful white dove walking down the wet road. A car approaches and the bird accidentally turns into the wheel rather than away from it. A gentle crunch. The car passes. A shape like a discarded napkin left in the road. Still perfectly white, no red stains, but bearing no relation anymore to the shape of a bird. A trail of white feathers flutter down the road after the car. The suddeness is very upsetting. That gentle crunch. ~ Antony Sher

I want to be able to raise my kid. I was totally being a martyr about it at first, thinking I could totally do it on my own, which I did for a while. I've hired a babysitter before, but as for a full-time caregiver ... for a control freak like me, it ain't gonna happen! ~ Keri Russell

The next thing I notice is the sheer quantity of crap in my living room...It's like a terrible episode of Changing Rooms. Flat has been redecorated to look immeasurably worse. Can only conclude that she was doing it on purpose - nobody could be this tasteless accidentally. ~ Beth O'Leary

At the same time that middle- and upper-middle-class mothers were urged to pipe Mozart into their wombs when they're pregnant so their kids would come out perfectly tuned, the government told poor mothers to get the hell out of the house and get to work--no more children's aid for them. Mothers like us--with health care, laptops, and Cuisinarts--are supposed to replicate the immaculate bedrooms we see in Pottery Barn Kids catalogs, with their designer sheets and quilts, one toy and one stuffed animal atop a gleaming white dresser, and a white rug on the floor that has never been exposed to the shavings from hamster cages, Magic Markers accidentally dropped with their caps off, or Welche's grape juice.... we've been encouraged to turn our backs on other mothers who pick their kids' clothes out of other people's trash and sometimes can't buy a can of beans to feed them. How has it come to seem perfectly reasonable--even justified-- that one class of mother is suppoed to sew her baby's diapers out of Egyptian cotton from that portion of the Nile blessed by the god Osiris while another class of mother can't afford a single baby aspirin? ~ Susan J. Douglas

What's he doing?" I asked, leaning over the side of the boat, searching for him beneath the water. If the tow rope had gotten tangled, he might need help. And someone would need to go in the water with him, perhaps accidentally sliding against him down where no one else could see.
"Boo!" A handful of bryozoa rushed up at me from the lake.
I screamed (for once I didn't have to think about this girl-reaction) and fell backward into the boat. Sean hefted himself over the side with one arm, holding the bryozoan high in the other hand. It dripped green slime through his fingers. "Bwa-ha-ha!" He came after me.
I squealed again. It was so unbelievably fantastic that he was flirting with me, but bryozoa was involved. Was it worth it? No. I paused on the side of the boat, ready to jump back into the water myself. He might chase me around the lake with the bryozoa, but at least it would be diluted. On second thought, I didn't particularly want to jump into the very waters the bryozoa had come from.
Sean solved the problem for me. He slipped behind me and showed me he was holding the ties of my bikini in his free hand. If I jumped, Sean would take possession of my bikini top.
I had thought about double knotting my bikini. I'd hoped against hope that Stage Two: Bikini would work, and that Sean might try something like this. Of course, I didn't really want my top to come off in front of everyone. Nay, in front of anyone. But I'd checked the double knots in the mi ~ Jennifer Echols

O God, forgive me - I am a proud, lustful, greedy man. I have loved authority too much. These people are martyrs - protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them - not a man like me, who loves all the wrong things. ~ Graham Greene

…I didn't even mean to. I was half asleep and just flipping over in bed," Rachel is saying, poking pensively at the broccoli on her plate with her fork. "And my hand accidentally brushed…over there. He just freaked out! He flung it away like - like…I don't know. Like it was a rat or a spider. And he called me a pervert! ~ Nicole Amakan

Stand like a beaten anvil. ~ Ignatius Bishop And Martyr

Valys also didn't think I was good enough for him. He made that clear every time he acted like a martyr forced to settle. But what he didn't understand was that if he thought I might not be good enough for him, he definitely wasn't good enough for me. I was well aware of my flaws, but I knew my merits, too; I shouldn't have to be anyone's second-best. Least of all, his. ~ Nenia Campbell

Once your baby starts to walk you'll realize why cribs are designed like prisons from the early 1900s. This is clearly because toddlers are a danger to themselves. The main responsibility for a parent of a toddler is to stop them from accidentally hurting or killing themselves. ~ Jim Gaffigan

Does it scare you?" said Clare. "Living in a house with guns?"
Hunter smiled. "It's not like I wake up in the middle of the night to find them staring down at me."
"Shut up." She gave him a light shove. "No, I mean, are you ever worried you'll accidentally get shot?"
"You mean, when I catch the assault rifle raiding the refrigerator? Like maybe it'll turn on me?"
Her breath caught again. "You have an assault rifle in your house?"
"Sure. It's partial to lime Jell-O. ~ Brigid Kemmerer

That's not true, Gran." Meg had to stand up for herself if no one else was going to. "I love the outdoors." Not, but there was no way she was going to sound like a wuss. "Why, remember that time your parents took you camping when you were ten? You went potty in the woods and accidentally sat on a wasps' nest. ~ Miranda Liasson

The Virtues of Selfishness

If you are not selfish you will not be altruistic, remember. If you are not selfish you will not be unselfish, remember. Only a very deeply selfish person can be unselfish. But this has to be understood because it looks like a paradox.

What is the meaning of being selfish? The first basic thing is to be self-centered. The second basic thing is always to look for one's blissfulness. If you are self-centered, you will be selfish whatsoever you do. You may go and serve people but you will do it only because you enjoy it, because you love doing it, you feel happy and blissful doing it - you feel yourself doing it. You are not doing any duty; you are not serving humanity. You are not a great martyr; you are not sacrificing. These are all nonsensical terms. You are simply being happy in your own way - it feels good to you. You go to the hospital and serve the ill people there, or you go to the poor and serve them, but you love it. It is how you grow. Deep down you feel blissful and silent, happy about yourself.

Excerpt from Love, Freedom, Aloneness ~ Osho

A moment later, he plopped down on the sand beside her, and when they accidentally touched, Gabby had the briefest flash of them sitting together just like this on a hundred different weekends in the future. ~ Nicholas Sparks

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

I totally kicked Ashman ass over there! I was all like hi-yah and you wanna piece of me? I was a super slayer! Buffy's got nothing on me."
...
"It was life and death out there, guys. Life and death. They just kept coming at me and I just kept putting them down ... I mean, sure, I screamed like a girl a few times and accidentally stabbed myself at the beginning, but still. ~ Chelsea Fine

My parents, last time we went to Ikea, got into a huge fight, almost got divorced. My dad accidentally put his fist through the wood. I don't know what it was made of. Just going there it's like a maze. My mom makes me go. I get lost. It's very stressful. ~ Jedediah Bila

What if I accidentally hit somebody? Because my dad took one of his friends golfing, and it was, like, one of his first times and he knocked out a duck. Like, I'm scared that's going to happen. ~ Jessica Simpson

It's almost like, when someone plays poker for the first time, they might be a professional poker player out of ignorance, just accidentally winning. That was how it felt in my first stand-up appearance. ~ Jonah Hill

It was the colors that had initially attracted her, the vibrant blue of the Bunsen flame and the dusty red of copper and the deep violet of permanganate. It was the logic of balanced equations, the certainty that when element A mixed with element B, compound C would appear. It was like predicting the future; it was like magic. Most of all, it was being: of having to be so careful with the hydrochloric acid, of accidentally burning herself while lighting a match, of discovering. ~ Amy Zhang

Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dream of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend. But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years, past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit - an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility - the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one's soul with all of this - the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling - this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fishermen is still rowing ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It should be inserted here parenthetically that there's a school of mechanical thought which says I shouldn't be getting into a complex assembly I don't know anything about. I should have training or leave the job to a specialist. Thats a self-serving school of mechanical eliteness I'd like to see wiped out. [ ... ] You're at a disadvantage the first time around it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it will almost undoubtedly take a lot more time, but the next time around you're way ahead of the specialist. You, with gumption, have learned the assembly the hard way and you've a whole set of good feelings about it that he's unlikely to have. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

When I was a kid, my mother thought spinach was the healthiest food in the world because it contained so much iron. Getting enough iron was a big deal then because we didn't have 'iron-fortified' bread. Turns out that spinach is an okay source of iron, but no better than pizza, pistachio nuts, cooked lentils, or dried peaches. The spinach-iron myth grew out of a simple mathematical miscalculation: A researcher accidentally moved a decimal point one space, so he thought spinach had 10 times more iron than it did. The press reported it, and I had to eat spinach.
Moving the decimal point was an honest mistake--but it's seldom that simple. If it happened today I'd suspect a spinach lobby was behind it. Businesses often twist science to make money. Lawyers do it to win cases. Political activists distort science to fit their agenda, bureaucrats to protect their turf. Reporters keep falling for it.
Scientists sometimes go along with it because they like being famous. ~ John Stossel

What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.

Hang-gliding," I said, "accident."

Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser."

I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did.

I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils ~ William Gibson

My lack of faith in God is not a dilapidated house.
It does not need to be razed to the ground or burned down to cinders.
I refuse to be the wounded woman on a cross
that you crucify with your disapproval like nails;
I will only be the woman who believes in thunderstorms
the same way lightning loves the tops of trees it strikes
every time it gets tired of being pent up in an unforgiving sky,
the only difference is that I believe these are natural weather phenomenons,
not God's belly rumbling or synapses firing.
When my doorway is filled with groups of people
wielding religious conversion pamphlets like crossbows,
I will be the martyr who steps aside to let the arrows
crack through the plaster in my wall instead of piercing my chest.
This is not a eulogy to the believer I could have been.
This is a battle cry to the believer I always have been,
believer in sunsets like splashes of paint, handholding
like willow branches brushing one another, new mornings
after old nights spent drowning in despair, believer
in love as an entire language instead of a single word.
Just because my beliefs align themselves on a different spectrum
does not mean they are the wrong wavelength or color.
And even though I think the universe was created by the Big Bang
instead of a God with magic dust shooting from his fingertips,
my universe does not contain fewer stars. ~ Meggie Royer