Here is an interlude from the normal for the most amazing thing I've read today.

"Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by God, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

— Rosemary Urquico

Finding Myself

My fingers are cold on this night.
All I want is to smoke indoors.
Lazy and naked,
like the Parisian girl I always
knew myself to be.
Turning my bath water on and off,
and searching for Aphrodite in my big toe.

Outside, a pretentious wind pushes the trees
back and forth,
causing something to circle inside me.
An uncomfortable, broken wish.
A hopeless longing that there won't be another
decision or another heartbreak
to sit through.

The caloused moon cuts at my knees
in those moments when the world seems as unreal
as a movie.
I exit the theatre,
and watch the sparks fly off the tip
of my cigarette like a homemade roman candle.

We all love to lose ourselves.
Ourselves burden us.
They poke at us, saying,
"Find me, find me, find me."

How long will it take me to
realize that the chase is everything?
To settle that inside.
To believe that this searching distraction
is all we're really looking for.
The constant disorienting knowledge
that we've never found ourselves,
but we're always looking,
saying, "Will you help?
I think I left it here at this table,
outside the cafe,
when I smoked that exploding cigarette."

Losing

What happens when someone you love,
loves someone else?
When they prefer their hand to rest
on someone else's lower back,
when they use someone else as a journal.
Spilling on their day,
the dirty contents of a
disasterous afternoon.

What if you knew that you
threw yourself away?
Away from him?
You labeled yourself as a stowaway,
as garbage,
and threw all overboard,
clamoring for life
alone.

Now, hypothetical is killing your hope
in cold blood.
The knowledge that he doesn't
mean a joke,
he means no.
To you.

Final and brick-like no,
falling on your head
from the upper story,
and you can't lose your memory.

Instead, your nightmare is reality.
She is there, perfect and bare,
and you wait and watch in a corner,
pocked and exposed,
like you only dreaded
you had the potential to be.

And as you vainly attempt to cover yourself
with clear tears,
a quiet blue-eyed voice tells you
that what you look like
is a human,
and isn't it time to move on?