Floodgates.

"May I see you again?" he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice.
I smiled. "Sure."
"Tomorrow?" he asked.
"Patience, grasshopper," I counselled. "You don't want to seem overeager."

"Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow." I rolled my eyes. "I'm serious," he said.

"You don't even know me," I said. I grabbed the book from the centre console. "How about I call you when I finish this?"

"But you don't even have my phone number," he said.
"I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book."

He broke out into that goofy smile. "And you say we don't know each other."


________


"After my PET scan lit up, I snuck into the ICU and saw her while she was unconscious. I just walked in behind a nurse with a badge and I got to sit next to her for like ten minutes before I was caught. I really thought she was going to die before I could tell her that I was going to die, too. It was brutal: the incessant mechanized haranguing of intensive care. She had this dark cancer water dripping out of her chest. Eyes closed. Intubated. But her hand was still her hand, still warm and the nails painted this almost black dark blue and I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. [...]

[...] What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to have her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."

("I do, Augustus.

I do.")


-- The Fault in Our Stars, John Green




It was unwise of me to make the book my bus-ride read, because when the book ended there and that way, the effect hit me like an endless ripple. Its effect lasted, refusing to leave, insisting to make me washed in emotions so overwhelming. These emotions so familiar as of late, these emotions I preferred not feeling.

And it was impossible to give in to my emotions on the bus even though that was exactly what I was inclined to do, because it would be completely weird to see someone tearing/ crying to a book's sad ending on the bus. Because most often we're made to perceive that crying is for the weak and we shouldn't need to feel and that "it's just a storybook". But we forget that it is someone else's story and struggle, taking possibly the same form or another, and that these things-- Love and Loss, are real and that they burn through everyone's hearts and minds in their own due time.


Oh, human love.