so you don't hurt so much

[mimi_rouge45]

"Thoughts and feelings like those...destroy the first phase of one's youth--its careless happy freshness. The first thing I noticed about you the other day was that that had gone--if indeed you ever really had it. And I am afraid that all the compensation in the world will not bring it back to either of us ever. When one has known, one can never be again as one was before one knew. But I suppose it's no use weeping over last year's dead leaves. All the tears in the world cannot make them green again. Perhaps when it is all over we shall find that other and better things have taken root in the mould of their dying."

from Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, 1933