Nicoles Notes

This is how you fall out of love. It will be slow, and it will be painful; like slowly ripping off a bandaid, except much fucking worse. It will be gradual, like the coming of spring. Their memory will linger like stale cigarette smoke. Your senses will be deprived of their touch, their scent, their taste. The flashbacks will bring tears to your eyes and they will hit you at the most inopportune of times. A stranger will smile at you and you'll wish they weren't around to see you cry.

This is how you will fall out of love. You will catch yourself not flinching at the mention of their name. You will speak of them in past tense, and not feel the need to correct yourself. Missing them will come in waves. On nights where you are drowning you will not reach for the phone; as desperately as you want to. Instead you will turn out the lights and fall asleep alone knowing they aren't beside you. You will find yourself staring at your reflection in the mirror and smiling. You will remember the way they kissed your cheeks but you will not miss them. You will allow yourself that smile because you are here, it is today and it is one step further from the last.

You will forgive them. You will forgive yourself. You will stop imagining a future where you meet up 10 years from now and start anew. There is no starting over. You will have many sleepless nights but one day you will stop dreaming of them when you do. You will fall out of love with them, they will fall out of love with you, and It will forever change your perception of what love really was or is.

This is how you will fall out of love. You will realize that you could never promise forever. You will be grateful for what once was and excited for what is yet to be. You are worth it, you are not broken and you will be okay.

the same number of times a young woman discovers in the middle of a noisy party that she is alone. I would like to make love to you like a man leaning his face from the window of a passenger train to catch one more look at the one woman he ever truly adored, but now he must leave behind.

Like a circus performer looking up at a ceiling of trapeze rings, crazy lights and precarious high wires, knowing he will never climb that high.

Like a washed up prize fighter reaching for the canvas because it is his only friend.

Like a bum reaching for a twenty dollar bill that is blowing across a busy boulevard.

Because I am doomed to live with you even when I am without you - you with your incomplete shoulders.

You with your rainbow colored lips.

You with your empty hands. Your perfumed silence, your perfect elegance. You, with the sunlight that leaks out of your darkness and into my world.