This Could Be Us (Skyland, #2)

by Kennedy Ryan

To those of us who never quite fit into the spaces they made for us. May we find our people. May we make our way. May we find our home.

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” —James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

All loves aren’t created equal. Some spring from the earth and wrap around and twine through our souls like vines. Some are plants that start with tiny seeds in your heart and blossom over time, nurtured by years and commitment.

There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.

“You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.”

I need to focus on rebuilding a life for me and my girls from the ground up. I also need to rebuild me. A me who doesn’t need a man, stands on her own, and gets what she needs to survive, even if she has to make it herself.

“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence

“I would have kids, if my love language was drudgery,” Hendrix drawls. “They be doing too little and needing too much. I got clients. I don’t need kids too. Everyone’s not made like that, and there’s a lot of folks walking around here who should never have tried being parents. I’m not gonna be one of them.”

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“I’ve come to realize that a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.”

Never has a man so affected me by simply holding my hand, but every time Judah takes my fingers in his, it’s like the sun trapped between our palms. And that point of contact is both searing and a comfort.

She loves an undeserving man. It’s a sorrow most women experience at some point in their lives, whether it’s a father who neglects or a son who forgets or a husband who betrays. These men let us down and we pull ourselves back up, hopefully with the help of other women who love us in ways that heal.

“As fast as God gives,” Yasmen says, “as fast as you get. One thing you shouldn’t second-guess is a blessing.”

I’m not crying because I might break. I’m crying because I’m healing, and I’m just so damn grateful for the journey I’ve chosen.

I believe wholeness is not a destination, but a lifetime process. Something that instead of waiting for, you could be living for.”

There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.

I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition. It’s the only way I have enough love for everyone who needs it—to love myself. No one can love me like I do. No one knows me like I know myself.

When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.

You make me forget the world when you kiss me, and it’s reckless and out of control, and yet there is no safer place. No one I trust more.

“If holding on to you is all it takes,” I say, wrapping my arms around him, tipping my head back to stare into his eyes, “then I’ll be fine.”

“I fall in love with myself and I want someone to share it with me.” —Eartha Kitt, iconic actress

Your skin is summer night and your kiss is all I want.