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Kindle Notes & Highlights
I find my voice is tired. My vocal cords strained from screaming over my own self-doubt.
I switch the song on the radio because it reminds me of you and I don’t feel like visiting you today. My mind understands the feelings evoked by the music are illusions, but try telling that to my soul.
You were not my person. You were my lesson.
Now I look back, fondly, missing the sounds of a crowded home with love and arguments and dogs yapping.
A testament to remembering where you came from, but understanding you do not have to stay there.
Wrong timing makes for star-crossed lovers and lethal thoughts.
When someone we love dies, we say we lost them. Perhaps this is our mind’s way of convincing our hearts we will one day find them again.
I like to think you slowed my world down.
There’s a fleeting romance found in the one-way ticket, but there’s undeniable comfort in the round-trip.
Though I explore— collecting passport stamps, hotel points and keycards, tiny shampoo bottles, and airline miles, I cannot imagine never looking back, never returning. I cannot fathom ever losing sight of the familiar horizon of home.
Everything that they’ve touched with their hands, heart, or eyes is given away or pushed to the back of your mind and closet, or moved into the attic. Not on purpose. Not because you want to forget they existed here with you, but because you kept existing and you accept that though you cannot recall what their voice sounded like, you will never forget how they made you feel.
I am constantly caught between being afraid I will always remember and being afraid I’ll forget one day.
Hiraeth
The comfort and peace and beauty are found in the reclaiming of your life in spite of it all.
I like to think families are stitched together by invisible threads. Some whose lengths extend down familiar hallways, others that span across miles and continents; but they are sewn together nonetheless, connected through blood and tears and laughter and birthdays.