L.O.V.E

“Dating someone who pushes you to be better is important.”

“Imagine being with someone where it’s enough safe to just talk for hours about your fears and the things you’re ashamed of … Hours of pure vulnerability. And when you look up again and expect the worst, you get kissed instead. imagine …”

“Do you ever wonder how much you exist in other people’s lives? I’m always curious if people think of me when a certain song comes on, or when they pass through a certain town. I wonder if I still exist in the minds of people that I don’t speak to anymore. I wonder how many times a day I pass through someone’s head.”

“And I think the thing that terrifies me most is that one day, you’ll be the story I’ll tell my daughter, when she’s curled up in bed, wrapped in blankets and heartbreak, when she hasn’t eaten anything in days but the voicemails he left her, when she hasn’t been able to sleep because the goodbye that broke her shatters her bones all over again every time she closes her fucking eyes. And I’ll climb into bed with her and she’ll lay her head on my lap and I’ll try to brush him out of her hair and her tears will soak through my shirt and I’ll tell her about the boy I met when I was sixteen, who sat next to me in math class, who I fell in love with after two weeks, who saved me, who fucking destroyed me. And I’ll tell her about how it hurt. It hurt so badly it almost killed me. It hurt so badly my mother stopped going to work so she could stay home and make sure I didn’t take too many pills. And then I’ll tell her about how it got better. How it stopped hurting. How I stopped bleeding. My mother went back to work. I got out of bed. But I won’t tell her that sometimes I still have dreams about you and can hardly breathe the next day or about the pictures of you I have hidden in the attic.”

“I was sixteen years old, crying on my bedroom floor the night he left me. My heart ached: my lungs struggled to breathe, and every bone of mine rattled at the thought of him with her. I didn’t sit there sobbing into a bowl of ice cream, whilst listening to our old favourite song, like they do in movies - I lay curled on the floor, holding my fragile bones together scared that I might fall apart. I knew that losing him wasn’t even going to be the worst part of all this - it would be losing myself.”

“You gave me forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”