I Don't Want To Be Me Anymore, Lord, Help Me Be Better

Kaveh Akbar, from “Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats“

Jon Ware, I Am In Eskew

“Accept this love I ask for. Accept the part of me that is you.”

Alejandra Pizarnik, from ‘On Your Anniversary’

“I am in your words, I know, as you are in all of mine.”

Edmond Jabés, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm A Tiny Book

“What I am giving you is nothing that belongs to me […] It is just yourself, you running through me throwing off sparks, your eyes blazing with fear, blazing with hope, I am giving you your own fire. All I do is breathe very gently on your night embers and handfuls of stars fly out.”

Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea

“losing through you what seemed myself, i find selves unimaginably mine”

e.e. cummings,  ‘silently if,out of not knowable’

 “He is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be, and if all else remained, and we were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. He’s always, always in my mind; not as a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“When you seem to be listening to my words, they seem to be your words, with me listening.”

Antonio Porchia, Voices

“No, Hans, my love, I am not as generous as you think nor do I give myself to you freely–whatever you take from me you have already given me […] When I think of you, when I give myself to you, I feel I am going to meet myself, and this makes me stronger and more serene.. what a selfish kind of generosity!”

Andres Neuman, Traveller of the Century

“I meant that you should discover me so, by my faint indirections, And I, when I meet you, mean to discover you by the like in you

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I met myself in you.”

Adonis, ‘Transormations of the Lover’

Nikita Gill, from “Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths & Monsters,”

Katherine Larson, from Radial Symmetry; “Lake of little birds”

[Text ID: “We touch each other briefly / and depart. As if memory / wasn’t a wound to bear.”]

— Anna Akhmatova, The Guest

[text ID: "What do you want?" I asked. / "To be with you in hell," he said.]

Leila Chatti, Postcard from Gone

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, Anne Carson | War of the Foxes, Richard Siken 

“Break my heart. Break it a thousand times if you like. It was only ever yours to break anyway.”

— Kiera Cass, The One