It’s such a cliché, but it’s true: you must set boundaries. Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with w… - Cheryl Strayed

There’s a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called “Splittings” that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: “I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence.” It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two — that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright — to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt with. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding and my dear one, you and I have been granted a mighty generous one.