In The Event This Doesn't Fall Apart

by Shannon Lee Barry

You have this way of looking at me that stops my heart; it is the way, I think, I’ve always dreamed of being looked at. Like I hurt your eyes a little. Like you can’t believe your luck to be standing in front of me.

I placed a hand to your cheek and it felt like the strongest pull and the widest gap and the closest friend.

I love every moment with you. This is no small thing. When you’re sleeping and when you’re upset and the part where I drop you off or hang up the phone and wait for you to text me. What we have is anything but small. It frightens me.

And we laugh and it’s easy and sometimes it’s too easy and something outside of us comes along to make it hard. And then, even then, with us sitting sad and broken it is easy. It is easy to go through something hard with you. I think that could be the beginnings of something like love. And I’m scared of that and how good it feels and how badly it could go but I’m not scared of you, more of how much I want it. How it’s been dormant in me for so long and then I see your face and I want it all; more nights out with drinks and me hanging on your arm, more mornings where you roll over and pull me into you, more of all of it and longer lasting and maybe even a guarantee, something I could count on.

You feel like something I could count on.

why do i feel like this should be a taylor swift lyric

Traces of you everywhere, a map leading right to me.

“Thanks for talking, Dom.” “Yeah, anytime. Literally. Ever.”

It feels like coming home.

You are waiting on the edge of my mind every morning when I wake up, ready to be thought about. You are never far from me.

You are warm and you smell like a campfire, all dust and flame and bug spray. You feel like a book I read a long time ago— learning you is like remembering something I’d seen written. Your thoughts spill onto me like a dog eared page or an underlined paragraph. Familiar but slightly surprising all the time. You open your arms to me and I think, I have been here before. This is safe.

And I am a person whole, long before you. I am a person whole without you. But I think the tiniest part of me will be suspended, waiting. There is the tiniest corner of life that won’t feel right until you’re back again.

And that night alone in my bed I cry for the third time, the last time. Not for the absence of you or the fear of what I’ve learned, but for the girl who used to fall asleep alone. Who taught herself how and did so perfectly happily for years, and undid it all in a few months for a boy who changed her mind. I cried for her, the loss of her, and the realization that I hope she never has to come back.

Happiness is bigger and better with you. I guess that’s just love when it’s good.

Back when love songs were just love songs, before every one became about you.

When it came to loving you, it was fact. There was never a decision at all.

I discover myself the more I’m with you. And I think I fell in love with me, too. You lit the path and I simply followed. You took my hand and led me through a gallery: Things That Are Amazing About Me. I learned myself the way I would a stranger. You showed me things I had always possessed but overlooked.

Take the chance to change your life. Take the chance for no other reason than because it’s come around.