The Places I've Cried in Public

by Holly Bourne

“You’re going to be inundated with requests now. But I get dibs, right? I noticed you first.”

Big RED flag!!!!

We leave behind echoes of our lives everywhere we go, trapping them into the fabric of the world around us.

“I was just going to say hi to Han—” But he took my hand, and I was so overwhelmed that I left my coffee behind as I was taken to his table

Big RED flag. Just let her see her friends. Constantly cuts her off and disregards her opinion/what she wants to do

And commiserations on going out with Reese.”

Hardly anyone ever has a nice thing to say about him. Alarm bells ringing

How you walked me lesson to lesson, being late to your own classes, because you couldn’t stand a minute of not being with me.

I tried to get you to sit with them sometimes, but you’d always have a good reason not to.

You never know if happy memories are going to become sad ones. They glow and shine in the vast realms of our subconscious, making that part of our brain feel like it’s filled with glitter. We pick them up and cradle them like expensive cats, or wriggle into them like they are jumpers we’ve left to warm on a radiator. Until the day when, for one reason or another, life can suddenly make this happy memory into a sad memory instead. Good memories exist in the naivety of not knowing any better.

“He loved me,” I say. Because that’s what you always said, after you did anything bad.

Reese would then catch my hand and promise me he wasn’t serious. “Oh, come on, Amelie. It was a joke! Of course I like your pretentious Drama friends!”

Everyone was so right about you. Apart from me.

The words I’d hang on to like an oxygen mask during everything that happened next.

I’m starting to think that some boys make girls cry, and then act like they’re crazy for

crying.

this was the first time I’d experienced one of Reese’s moods, so I hadn’t learned the rules yet.

Crying is a very obvious sign that something isn’t going right in your life. You should not ignore tears.

Guts and hearts aren’t always the most compatible – I’m starting to learn that. They pull in different directions, ignoring one another when they really shouldn’t. I think I need help working out which one I’m supposed to listen to.

“people we love can behave in very confusing ways. And if someone is treating us inconsistently it can have a confusing, almost drug-like effect on us.”

Kindness isn’t a reward for good behaviour, Amelie. It should be a given.”

You can’t force pain to leave until it’s ready to. Like the most annoying party guest, it only leaves in its own sweet goddamned time. Meanwhile there’s nothing you can do but carry it until it’s ready to be released. But understanding the pain – why it’s there, why it’s not leaving – it makes that burden much easier to bear.

“One of the things the brain does to feel safe, is it creates an intense bond with the person who hurts us. It’s the ego’s way of protecting itself.

I’m grieving for the me I was before I met you.

Because we always make the girls the villains rather than the victims.