She may be the face I can’t forget 
A trace of pleasure or regret 
May be my treasure or the price I have to pay 
She may be the song that summer sings 
May be the chill that autumn brings 
May be a hundred different things 
Within the measure of a day 

She may be the beauty or the beast 
May be the famine or the feast 
May turn each day into a Heaven or a Hell 
She may be the mirror of my dreams 
A smile reflected in a stream 
She may not be what she may seem 
Inside her shell

And my favourite day
Was the one where we did nothing

In room dining and talking about the moon
Cigarettes and hotel room television

Just you breathing next to me
And I, choosing you over sunsets

For you, a thousand times

And if I’m being honest? I don’t think you realize you love someone until you do. I think that is what makes it so beautiful. There is no loud, screeching halt inside of your heart, no neon sign that suddenly lights up and lets you know that you have found your favorite thing. No. I don’t think it works like that. I think it’s quieter, calmer. One day you’re just sitting across from someone, and you’re watching them tell some story you’ve heard twenty times, and everything inside of you feels safe. Everything is serene, and peaceful, and you almost laugh to yourself, because in the midst of all of that chaos, you realize just how deeply you care about them. In the midst of the crowd, or the background noise, or the chatter of other people in the restaurant, time slows down for a moment, and there it is — the rest of your life. There is it — love.

I‘ll tell you a couple of things about that first night that I knew, really, but pretended I didn’t. That he was the first person in years who thought about the questions I asked him and looked right at me when he replied. And the way he knew exactly where in my chest my heart was, every time he said my name.

I wish I wrote the way I thought,
Obsessively,
Incessantly,
With maddening hunger.
I’d write to the point of
suffocation.
I’d write myself into nervous
breakdowns.
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal
nothing.
And I’d write about you
a lot more
than I should. 

I wrote this thinking about you
and how if you were a novel,
you’d be an adventure of sadness and happiness
and love lost in between.
You would remind me of the sky and mountains
and constellations and caffeine.
You would be full of pages
that make me laugh and other times fall apart.
You would smell like history with a worn-out spine
and ink that could still bleed.
You would always be the novel
I took down from the shelf to read. 

if you love somebody you set them free

I keep retelling our story in my head like I’m telling it to our future kids that we’ll never have. The problem is that I didn’t just fell in love with you, I fell in love with the way I fell in love with you. Falling for you was in every way a cinematic masterpiece. And how am I supposed to forget my favorite movie I’ve ever seen because we began hopeless and lost and there were endless excuses for why I couldn’t be yours and you couldn’t be mine but love took hopelessness as an opportunity to persist. The most beautiful love stories are the ones where adversity meets its match, where my hand and yours is the damn that held back the tides but the damn is broken now and the movie didn’t end the way I wanted and I’ve learnt to press pause on the way that my heart beats for you but I can’t seem to find the remote to pause the movie too.

In the end I thought it would be you, but now all that‘s left of out love is the memory of it ending.

I say “our” love because yes, it was mine too, you can’t take that away from me. Sometimes I pretend the love was only yours so it hurts less when I think about life without you. I lie to my heart and say that it was you who still loved me, and me who couldn’t.

I can lie to myself but I can’t lie to you. I’m not sure I want you back but I know I never wanted you to go. I know I can do this without you, but I don’t want to.

I only wanted to love you & love you & love you until we could make it to the end

together.

I want to tell you I miss you with no subtext. No guilt, no anger, no expectation that you’ll fix it. I don’t want you to feel bad or tell me it will get better. This is where we are meant to be right now - me apart from you, my hands a little empty and my heart a little sad. I just miss you. I wanted you to know.

- expert from a book I’ll never write

sometimes love means taking a step back

and if we never talk again, please remember that I‘m forever changed by who you are and what you meant to me :)