I am not the girl that you will fall in love with. But I am the girl who will teach you a little bit about love.

–

The big concern is always that you will end up writing things for people, rather than for yourself. To justify – to prove something – to say something you’ve been too afraid to say to their face. I have always been good at – have always enjoyed – writing about people. Things that are completely obvious – things that nobody will ever fully understand. But I worry that one day, I will cave. That the pressure of having eyes that fail to interpret the things I write the way I want may lead me to write things meant for those specific eyes. I’m also afraid of being selfish. Of saying that this is all for me as though I don’t value those who take the time to read it. Here’s the fact, this is about you – many of you – and it’s about me, but a lot of it is about the you and the me intertwined, and the things that have happened over the past many years and how that all feels… But this isn’t for you. This is for me. I’m just happy you’re part of the process.

–

Maybe it does happen in an instant. Maybe I woke up that morning and asked myself if this was what I wanted to be doing and when I felt the ‘no’ sitting in the back of my throat I figured none of this was worth that feeling. I figured, one day, I am going to wake up and feel empty. And if that’s the case, the only things I should be doing right now are things that are going to fill me up.

–

He sat almost next to me but still slightly out of reach, and we talked about how everything began and left out the pieces about how it came to an end. And somewhere along the line there were words that fell off his tongue and I think he saw my heart crack in the back of my eyes. So I left the table to try and pull myself together, and when I came back I think I saw pieces of his own heart in his hands. We didn’t want to hurt each other, and yet, here we are.

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Some things are better left unsaid. But it’s too late now. They’ve been said out loud and you can’t cover up a truth when the words linger in the back of your mind. You can’t keep playing pretend when the reality has already set in.

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Just because you don’t want one thing, doesn’t mean you want the opposite of it – I remind myself, months later. After I’ve left my heart on the floor and swept it under the cabinet drawer; after I’ve scattered what I can remember and tried to rinse it all off in the shower.

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I realized then how twisted it was that the things we used to mend our loneliness were the things that made us lonely to begin with.

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I could have been in denial – it’s possible. But I knew the reality and I guess I thought that gave me license to never deal with my feelings. Does that make sense? It doesn’t matter how I feel about it, because you don’t feel anything at all. 

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I spent a good deal of time choosing to fall for people who I presumed would never fall for me. I could like them from a distance, at ease, without the pressure of their reciprocation. Because loving isn’t the scary thing, is it? It’s being loved back – it’s when their love becomes so familiar that the day it disappears feels like the day you forgot how to breathe. I don’t want to teach myself how to breathe, again. 

–

And he came down the stairs and I watched his eyes stay steady with mine and he didn’t have to say very much. I walked up the stairs and I held her while she cried – while we promised each other that it would all be more than fine. I would have done that every single god damn day, if it needed to be that way. Because sometimes people get sad beneath the weight of the world and I wish, I desperately wish, we had all the reasons as to why. But for the moments we don’t – for the moments we didn’t understand – we held each other’s hand, and for the time being that was enough. 

–

We walked through the woods and you talked about her while I thought about you. I wasn’t sure how we got here – how we went from drunken promises to sober lies – how not long ago you said it was for me, and now I was helping you, for her.