Sounds Like Love

by Ashley Poston

And what an enchanted thing music was, to persist long after its performers.

If you spend your entire life comparing everything to the best thing you ever made, then you aren’t gonna find joy in any of it. You’ll just be unhappy that they aren’t like the original thing, you know?”

because in the end, if I’m not creating something that makes me feel, then what’s the fucking point?”

“It’s easy. You know you’re in love when they are the first person you want to hear in the morning and the last person before you go to bed. My mom told me that once, and I just never forgot it.”

My grams used to tell me that love is rare. The real kind.” Gigi pulled her arm through Mitch’s, her face thoughtful and adoring. “It’s not given, it’s not stolen—love is borrowed, she always said. It’s borrowed, and how lucky we are to be afraid of losing it.”

“How do I forgive my past self for all the futures I didn’t become? I don’t know.”

grief was a love song in reverse. The notes were still there, but they sounded a little different.

And the truth was, there was no last good day. There was just this slow fade, bit by bit, like the sun sinking below the gentle waves of sand dunes.

Mom once asked how she could forgive her past self for all the futures she didn’t become, and I wasn’t sure I knew that answer then, but I did now. There was nothing to forgive. Because my mom lived in the moment, wide and full and loud, and she danced in the rain and she sang her favorite songs at the top of her lungs, and she was here—in a place regret couldn’t touch.