Pretty Things

This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you.

“Let’s move and just try it again.”

I knew that within seconds of commenting each person had already moved on to the next post in their feed and forgotten me.

It’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, despite your best—or worst—intentions.

But I was too afraid to know about the dark things that lived inside her head; my own were hard enough to take.

We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don’t want to see.

But life and circumstance do their work on the biases that are already written into our genes. Our bad behavior is rewarded; our weaknesses go unpunished; we aspire to ideals that can never be achieved and then grow bitter when we can’t reach those goals. We look out at the world, we measure ourselves within it, and become more and more entrenched in one position.

WE AREN’T BORN MONSTERS, are we?

After all, women trust men who have female friends to vouch for them.

Ashley was always too good to be true.