Pillow Thoughts II: Healing the Heart

by Courtney Peppernell

Love is a mountain, a river, a hand to hold, it’s courageous, fierce, honest, and bold. It’s a shoulder when you weep, a blanket when you sleep. It is family, it is strength, it is faith. Love has no boundaries, no gender, love just exists.

You have every right to love your solitude Being alone doesn’t always mean you are lonely

I know you come with baggage, but so do I. I know you’re scared because of how others treated you. But as the sun rises and sets, I’m falling in love with all the things you do.

Sometimes the smallest details about a person are the biggest reasons why you love them

You can’t choose which parts of her you love. Even in all the ugly moments, she should still be the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with. People are not perfect, they have flaws. You don’t get to choose which ones to leave out. That’s not honest love.

Everything is another story to the bookshelf you are building. Their happiness becomes just as important as yours. You learn to love what they love. You’ll want to be better. Because they’ve made you better.

You are not more than I can handle. Even if you come with a suitcase full of insecurities, I will still want to know you. Even if there are days when you are crying and don’t believe in your worth, I will still want to hold you. I know you have struggled; so have I. I know that things are hard on you; me too. But it doesn’t change how big your heart is. I am old enough to make my own choices, and I choose you.

If this is what love feels like, I am seeing you in everything I do.

I have messy handwriting and I don’t always know what to say, but I would write love letters to you all day.

I can be forgetful and spend nights all over the place, but your name is in my heart and it takes up the most space.

My pen could write for a thousand people But it never smiles about them the way it does for you

I just want to wear your t-shirts and wake up in your arms. I just want to kiss you over coffee and sleep in with you during rainstorms. I just want to hold your hand in the street without having to worry what people will think.

As long as you will have me, then I will be yours because I want to make you happy for all our years So, I want to say thank you for all that you are and do and my heart is so full of all its love for you

I love this closeness between us. I pine for every one of her kisses. I’d spend my days driving the coastline with my love beside me. An infinite dark sky with stars because she reminds me of the moon. Moments spent with her can never come soon enough. To watch our love grow between white sheets and wine, from strangers to she-is-mine. To be young and wild, then to blossom together into old age. If I could write all my love for her between these lines, it would fill every page.

Tonight, we are apart, so I am awake.

Being with her is like listening to a song that I will always remember. It doesn’t matter how many times I listen to the song, I’ll always remember my first time hearing it. It felt like the song knew me, and not who I pretended to be when the headphones weren’t in. It felt like driving around late at night, and the song plays on the radio, and you just know it’s a song that will change your life.

We aren’t perfect, we never will be. But I love talking to you, I love telling you how I feel and having you listen to me. And I love listening to you too. All your hopes and dreams and insecurities. Because when everything fades away and our age begins to show, all we will have left is to listen. And because I love the sound of your voice and the echoes of your soul, I will listen...

How do you do that? You make me feel your love even in my bones

Now I’m wondering if destiny exists, if fate rests in our hands and makes us fall so in love we can barely stand.

Even if I have loved long before, this time my heart is beating loud.

I will never apologize for all this love I have to give. Because it’s yours and I love you more than anything.

Just because we have years ahead of us doesn’t mean our love isn’t going to last a lifetime. Then again maybe we don’t have years; everything could end tomorrow. But I will love you anyway. Every day, deeply, wholeheartedly, even if we are young, even if we are old. My love for you will be gentle, but fierce and bold.

Their eyes become galaxies to get lost in.

Suddenly their body becomes a map, a diagram, a place to create pathways with your own fingertips. You’ll treat this as a delicate rite of passage, as though someone is letting you touch gold. You’re an artist who wants to draw across their canvas. You’re an explorer who wants to discover all the places your body fits with theirs.

Above anything, love will always come back into your life.

When you say you’ve given up on love, all you’re really saying is that you’ve closed your eyes.

Writers don’t just write about nothing. They write about the things kept in the deepest part of their hearts.

I hope you find a love that kisses you with such intensity, in that moment you forget how to breathe.

And the worst kind of heartbreak is the kind that comes along when you have to watch the person you love be happy with someone else

The ache will pass with every tide and return when things have come crashing down. It is a continuous cycle, here to make you stronger.

But you live life recklessly in all your lonely space I wanted to fill parts of you to love you with all I had But not if it meant losing myself in your misery

You will have your heart broken so badly you will question if love still exists But there are still souls in this life who will say your name in between kisses spelled with their lips and they will hold your hand and they won’t let go

There is no such thing as heartlessness. If someone is cruel and unkind, it is because they do not know of the kindness from strangers or the light within love. And if they do not know of light, how sad and lonely they must be, to become demons of the night.

Just because the bruises aren’t visible doesn’t mean they aren’t there

The grief will feel like a shadow. Each time you look in the mirror it will be around you. But its purpose is to guide you back from the depths of despair. It might not make any sense, but grief understands what you can handle. It knows what is and isn’t fair.

As tragic as it seems as hurtful as it feels if they gave up on you in your worst moment they never really loved you

We were not made to be easy to love. All that soul inside you will still be heard, even after the day you die.

So, you’ll stare into an empty bottle and wish life were as simple as a high school dance.

How many heartbreaks can you survive? All of them Because you are not merely skin and bones You are the light and wonder You are a joy to be known You are the castle a soul calls home

You are your own journey. The pain belongs to you.

You still love them, even if they no longer love you. There is bravery in letting go of a love you thought you knew. There is no shame in wanting someone who doesn’t want you back. But darling, you deserve someone who wants to love you just as much.

Ache is good for you, even though I know it doesn’t feel l...

Because you will learn that life is only meant to be lived with someone who respects your hopes and dreams like their own. Heartbreak teaches you the difference between a person who is no good for you and someone who would never leave you alone.

The hardest thing you will ever do in your life is forgive someone who never apologized. But you don’t need to do this for them; you need to do this for yourself.

there is seldom a heart that escapes pain like it has a choice. But you do get to choose how you recover. And that is something that cannot be taken away from you, not even by another.

There is no limit on the time it takes to heal. But you must continue to feel. You need to break and bend and then ask yourself when all the misery will end. Because it will end. One morning you will wake up and you will notice the sun, you will notice the newspaper on your front lawn and that the nightmares have gone, you will notice yourself and how far you’ve come in moving on.

Every time we try this again, it only ends in goodbye. Our sad truth is that we should never have tried.

Such a sad soul, living in a world you don’t belong. I know all those love songs on the radio only remind you of the love that’s come and gone. Closing eyes and dreaming of a place where you don’t feel so alone.

You must remember that you are human. Filled with thoughts and feelings that will make you ache until the pain feels it might stay. But it is not here to ruin you. The ache is here to remind you that you will survive, in anything you do.

Everyone seems to think that love like this doesn’t exist with distance. But then they don’t read their emails late at night, speaking to you in secret coded words.