Aleksandra

Teach your children that they are alright. Don’t criticize them. Just be loving.

Worst feelings: crying yourself to sleep, being ignored, discover the person you love loves someone else,someone falls out of love with you.

“Everyone says your first love hurts the most,” she said. “But they must not have fallen in love a second time.” I looked at her, so broken and cold. She was fiddling with the dirt under her nails just to keep her hands busy. “Why do you say that?” She shuddered a little and tried to bring her jacket closer around her body. “You have your guard up the second time. It’s not so easy to let someone in,” she explained. “But eventually you do. And no matter what lessons you thought you learned from the first time, they all fade away when he looks at you and says he would never hurt you.” She met my eyes for a split second before looking up at the stars. I could see tears pooling in them, and her blue eyes resembled a roaring ocean. “But he will. He did. And then, you’re left all alone again, with even more scar tissue than you had to begin with.”

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some reason is really getting to your heart. You’re just standing there thinking about going to work and picking up your dry cleaning. And also more exciting things like books you’re reading and trips you plan on taking and relationships that are springing into existence. Or fading from your memory, which is far less exciting. And suddenly you just don’t feel at home in your skin or in your house and you just want home but “Mom’s” probably wouldn’t feel like home anymore either. There used to be the comfort of a number in your phone and ears that listened everyday and arms that were never for anyone else. But just to calm you down when you started feeling trapped in a five-minute period where nostalgia is too much and thoughts of this person you are feel foreign. When you realize that you’ll never be this young again but this is the first time you’ve ever been this old. When you can’t remember how you got from sixteen to here and all the same feel like sixteen is just as much of a stranger to you now. The song is over. The coffee’s done. You’re going to breathe in and out. You’re going to be fine in about five minutes.

There are certain names that will always taste like regret and stomach acid on my tongue.

She hated being so clumsy with words, when words meant so much.