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Started reading
July 2, 2025
Winds in the east, mist coming in Like something is brewing and about to begin. Can’t put my finger on what lies in store But I feel what’s to happen all happened before. – Bert from that movie starring BJ’s second-favourite girl
I started therapy to get her back, wanting to grow into the kind of person she’d want to be with, be good enough, be the sort of person worthy of a girl like Parks. I definitely wasn’t before and maybe I won’t ever be—even if we’re dead in the ground for good, can’t hurt to try to be good enough anyway.
because I couldn’t tell them that actually he is the drain in the centre of me where all the happy things fall through and that I feel his absence in everything. Everything.
That pull we have, the undertow of the universe always dragging us back towards each other, it has to mean something, don’t you think? That great magnetic force I’ve spent the better (or worst) part of a year fighting and defying and I feel it still, my legs trying to walk me back into his orbit—I think it means something.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it’s not proud. It doesn’t dishonour others, it’s not self-seeking, it’s not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.
I love this verse
“How’s the weather, Parks?”
And his stupid pillow mouth rips at the seams of my resolve not to love him how I worry I always will, and my mind falls through an infinity of memories I’ve had with him and thought I’d have with him and worry I won’t ever have with him again.
and the years whistle around our ankles like leaves in the wind and we’re lovers in autumn under a tree raining orange and regret, and in that moment we’re still each other’s and time wraps around us in the infinity we thought we had but we don’t anymore because he broke us.
so beautifully sad
He laughs and for some reason it sounds like I’m ringing the doorbell of the home I grew up in.
I slip into the toilet, lock the door and lean against it as a terrible revelation dawns on me. It’s like the morning sun when you forget to close the curtain—it’s my fault, I should have closed the curtain, I knew the sun was there, I knew the sun would eventually rise again, but I didn’t close the curtain and now this invasive, bright, shimmering light wakens me from the slumber I was using to avoid it. I still love him.
I look over at her more tenderly than I should, feel an old kind of missing her in my chest that I wish would just die but it can’t seem to take its last breath. Every time it takes one it takes another and another, and it’s never a last breath. Loving her like this is a kind of breathing that feels like dying.
“BJ, you can love someone and not have it rule you, not have it dictate your every waking thought and decision. You can love someone and still retain your power and autonomy. You can love someone and have it just be there, a part of you, and still have a completely functional life—” She pauses and gives me a long look. “Even if it’s a life without them.”
And then my eyes fall down the trunk to the stone we lay to remember the tiny baby girl we lost that no one even knows we had, and there are magnolias laying there and I know he was here.
Funny with pain, how it propagates itself, grows into you, becomes a part of you. Shapes you a bit.
I’ll wear it like a badge of honour forever that he loved me first, that he loved me at all. Have you ever had a love like that?
She’s touching him—his wrists, his hands, his hair—and each one tears me up a little—the only okay part is the part where his eyes are just on mine.
“Like the prettiest girl in the room.” I nod once. “In every room, Parks,” I tell her but she won’t remember.
try to make it sound like having too much history with Magnolia Parks isn’t the mounted deer I’ll hang in the hallway of who I am, like loving her isn’t the first thing you see when you walk through the door of me.
Parks nods once, her eyes all soft, her whole face just a giant beating heart that I want to keep inside my chest.
“You were very brave,” she tells me
He’s never been here, he’s never even seen a picture of it, and still my mind plays out how it would feel to have him standing over in that kitchen making me a cup of tea and my heart flip flops into a panic because I wonder how we’ll ever get there?
I want her to be everywhere. Wherever I am I want her there.
I pull it out of my pocket and drop it into her hand, letting myself touch her a little longer than I should. She stares down at it, the gold twisted rope bow necklace I bought her when I was sixteen, the one she loved and lost years ago. The one that I have a tattoo of on my thumb.
I’ll be drowning in her anyway for the rest of my life. Happily, too. What a way to go. What a life.
There are those attachments—Bridget’s trauma bonds, the willow tree, all the ways we’ve hurt each other to feel close to each other, all the ways he saved me when we were little, literally and metaphorically, the oysters, the bad men in Greece, the losers in London night clubs with busybody hands, the teachers, Marsaili, shitty boys in school with big mouths full of lies. I have all these ties to him. First boyfriend, first kiss, first love, first time, first everything, really. How he was my teacher and my partner in so many key life areas. My best friend and my family and my pillow and my
...more
because he loved me. It’ll be what they put on my tombstone, I think. He Loved Her. I hope that’s what they’ll say about me.
Do I love her? Of course I fucking love her. She’s everything I’ve ever wanted.
I don’t love anything more than I love her,
We didn’t fight before but now it’s all we’ve got left. Closest thing to throwing her against a wall and kissing her is just throwing words at her.
The great monument to our love is a withering tree and a blank stone that means the world to me and maybe nothing to anyone else.
“They make me think of you,” she tells me, looking up at them. “The stars?” She nods. I glance at her. “Why?” I know why. “Fated.” She gives me a shy look. “That we’re written in them. Something stupid like that.”
“If you love a flower . . .” I say eventually, glancing at her. One of my tattoos, about her, like all of them are. “—That lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night,” she says, staring up at them.
me and her in the backyard of our house on that island, my hand in her hair, her hands on my chest—might as well have signed my life away in the moment. Never again would a day go by where I didn’t think of her, where she wasn’t my very waking thought.
“Magnolia Parks . . .” She smiles over at me, eyes going soft. “I love it when you say my name.” “Yeah?” She nods. “I love how it sits in your mouth, like you were supposed to say it all the time.”
she’ll be the thing I’ll always come back to. She’s my Mecca.
I reach over, hold her face in my hand, hold her eyes how I’m going to hold her body in a second. “I love you, Parks.”
Touching Parks is like touching no one else. It’s like coming home.
“—It’s the seed of a willow tree.”
omg awwwwww
“Am I ever going to be good enough for you?”
Leave her alone? Never. I won’t ever leave her alone.
I used to think about that night a lot. Me and Julian and what we didn’t do. He’s a strange person, but I sort of love being next to him. There’s just this feeling you get from being by him that’s not like anything else in the world.
When you know, you know. We’re meant to be, me and Parks. Right? That’s what this is about. We’re fated. Woven into the tapestry of the universe, my name right next to hers. We’re in the stars.
We’ve rounded a lot of corners. Her heart breaks in her eyes like a dropped egg and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore without her. I hate being without her. Rummage through the drawer in my mind as fast as I can to find the words to tell her that I’m coming for her, I’m on my way back, that this is just the long way home.
I just need the person I’m actually in love with in real life to come find me, get down on his knees, tell me he’s an idiot and that he made a mistake—again—that it was just a misunderstanding, and please please please will I take him back? I’d pretend to umm and ahh about it for a minute but then I’d get down on my knees too because I love him and I always will.
“Do you think I’m crazy?” she asked, quietly. “No.” I shook my head. “I think you’re the best.” “Even though you know the worst parts of me?” “I don’t know the worst parts of you.” I ran my thumb over her scar. “I just know you, Parks.”
Wonder how long it’ll take for us to get to the place where I can just throw my arm around her, let her be mine out loud, not just inside my head.
In every quiet whisper, every subtle and nuanced thread in the fabric of time, all the tiny ripples in the universe will tell you, that I’m actually just Parks’s.
We weren’t fused yet, but we were fusing, actively and in real time.
“In another life I reckon I could have loved you.” I tilt my head, looking up at him. “In another life I would have let you.”
In what world, what shit has to happen between you and someone that you miss just being able to stare at them, because I’ve missed staring at her.
