Tyler Kent White

But I do know there are not enough syllables to spell out how much I love you. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love… You are my every moment, my every hour, my every day, my every season, and I know this isn’t poetry and it’s certainly not a haiku, it’s just all the things I needed to say to you.

To me, you’ll always be the rising suns, the sinking moons, and all the stars that come between the sound of rain and river stones, the warmth of my sheets, the ache in my bones.

Come to me, wild and untamed. Bring the oceans on your lips, the mountains on your spine; I want to explore all the places you have ever called home. Let me pluck each petal from the gardens you’ve grown, overcrowded seedlings pushing up through your bones. Come to me dipped in the stars, come to me wearing all your scars. I want to show you just how beautiful you are.

One day I will kiss you, kiss you with lips that understand, kiss you with lips that can better explain, that can speak in so many languages. They will know how to say I love you in ways you have never heard, in ways that sound unlike anything any other man has mouthed before, false promises and fairy tales they did not ever believe in. One day I will kiss you, pressed words between your lips. I will kiss you and they will rattle between your teeth, run down your throat, and fill your lungs. They will echo against your ribs, they will reverberate through your limbs, they will dress every corner you’ve kept sadness hidden away until all that grows inside of you is the understanding that you are enough. One day I will tell you all about my paper napkin theories, algorithms I formed that demonstrate how the sum of all that you are, is greater than infinity, but to me you have always been the one.

You deserve to give yourself the same love that you give to everyone else.

This morning I woke with my ear pressed between shoulder blades. Every inhale, every drum, every pump, thump of your heartbeat said one thing – home, home, home.

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.

I apologize when I’m wrong.

Life’s three best teachers: heartbreak, empty pocket, failures.

I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

Nothing is more difficult, in my opinion, than to avoid something that fundamentally attracts you.

When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived; and that, I think is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition.

No matter how flat you make a pancake, it’s still got two sides.

A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.

You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things-travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes…but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys. Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at Grandma’s house. And a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both. He was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door.

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.