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“Life was easier when we weren’t all so available and easy to interrupt, right?”
That’s what’s unfair about breakups. They’re nearly always one-sided. One person has made their mind up way before the other. They’ve done the grieving, they’ve done the boxing away of feelings, and you—well, your feelings are still wandering around, like lost kittens, trying to find their home.
Big things, I hope, might happen someday, but it’s the little things that are important, isn’t it? They keep us grounded. The little things are the things we miss the most when normality is turned on its head.
“My life has started. I’m in it. It’s not something I’m waiting for anymore. I’m here. And whatever I wanted for my life, was it this?”
He presses his lips to mine—warm, soft lips that taste like whiskey and chewing gum, and as he moves, deepens the kiss, and warm stubble prickles against my face, I swear my whole body feels like it’s alive, and I’m nothing now but stars.
If someday is going to be now, then I have to stop being afraid. We are supposed to let go of things. We are supposed to make room for new. Things are meant to change. Say yes, panic later.
“If you want my opinion,” he says, “I think he’s scared.” “But Sam doesn’t strike me as someone who gets scared. He climbs mountains. Icy mountains. With lions.” Frank shrugs. “Safer to climb a mountain than to risk getting your heart broken.”
“I’ve gone my whole life without feeling the way I do when I’m with you,” he says. “I don’t want to go another day.”
When you’re scared of something for so long, it has a way, as Frank said, of becoming part of your blueprint. You tell yourself it’s just not for you—that you don’t make the rules, and all those things everyone else seems to get, just aren’t open to you, aren’t available. But they are. Anything is, as Sam has made me see, as I have made me see. And who says you can’t draw another blueprint? Rub parts out over time, replace the lines and paths the more you tread them.
the only way to live forever is to leave parts of yourself behind. And that’s what this is. A part of me.
