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The neckline is too plunging to wear the necklace I always wear in secret, so I had to take it off and my heart feels like it’s sitting on uneven ground without it.
Does she stil have the necklace BJ has tatoed
The most beautiful boy in every room, the great love of my life—how many loves do you get in a lifetime? I remember wondering that. How many people will look at me like he does, not just like I’m the sun but like I’m the whole god damn universe.
like a physical punch in the gut, how much I loved him. Really loved him. To the bone, loved him. Cut me and I’d bleed him. How much I needed him, still needed him, would forever, always, never couldn’t even if I tried, needed him. And I remember being deeply afraid of what my life would be like without him in it.
What a mind fuck it is to comfort the person who just blew your whole heart open with a rifle.
She catches my eye from across the room, holding like our hands can’t.
Magnets. That’s what the boys say about us. Sometimes we’re the same pole, sometimes we’re opposites, but we move each other. Pushing away, pulling closer.
And I wonder what love is like for other people… Is love for everyone wordless exchanges and a million memories that fuck you up to the bone?
When all that’s left of loving each other is hating each other.
when it comes to her, I have zero instinct for self-preservation. I’ll die in her arms or at her doorstep trying to get back into them,
Reminds me of romeo and juliet
I’ll love him ’til I die, love him ’til it consumes me whole and kills me dead—so maybe love doesn’t conquer all but just some. Because all is vast and love is so varied, like light in a prism; if you move it around a room, depending on how it catches, it changes. It means different things and there are so many different things love can be to people.
I know that some love is beautiful, and some is freeing, some unravels you, some love poisons you, some blinds you, some betters you, and some loves break you in invisible ways that no one else knows about until you have to stand up and the weight of your love crushes your bones.
He nods again, thinking about it. “Not how you love him though.”
And he isn’t mine completely, I know that. I know he loves someone else but so do I, and maybe that’s okay because maybe you do get more than one love in a lifetime.
Maybe BJ is the great love of my life not because he’s great but because he’s been defining, and maybe Tom will be the redeeming love of my life, and maybe that’s better?
“She should have. You overdosed. You nearly died. You did it to yourself—” I sigh. “Not on purpose—” I promise, not on purpose. I’d not do that to her.
“She thinks if you die, she’ll die.” She gives a small shrug, happy with her conclusions.
I always loved this willow tree, even before. There’s something poetic about it, even before there were poems to write. It weeps into the water, leaves swinging low like a chariot, bending like it’s broken, but none of that makes the tree less beautiful.
At the altar of the tree, I make a thousand soundless prayers and offerings, beg whoever’s listening to align our stars and let him be who I thought he was. If he can’t be that, I pray, may I be free of him and not have it kill me. But he is worth dying over and that’s the part that gets me, I guess.
“Trauma bonds,
We look at each other with eyes that are saying more than our mouths ever could.
The air between us begins to thicken—like how a tropical island feels before a storm breaks. Heavy and charged. Tangible.
Like waves crashing into a cliff face, that’s how we kiss.
he’s going to hurt you again, and I don’t know that I’ll be here when he does.”
