“Sometimes I remind myself that I almost skipped the party, that I almost went to a different college, that the whim of a minute could have changed everything and everyone. Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.”

“I adore the struggle you carry in yourself. I adore your terrifying sincerity.”

Some people have bruises they don’t know about, and the rain can still hurt windows as if glass  was cotton. Cotton pretending to be insides of a fist. The sky crying newborn tears and a howl. How a little thing can sound wolf even without teeth and darling, this is how we are. Someone asks us to spell love and we tell them it is a thousand bee stings  before the honey comes. How sugar can cut our fingers gentle and war first before holding hands. Some people have bruises and they forget how much of their hurt becomes poem before blood. So I start kissing your forehead. The Mars rover  is still exploring red scars and we think our moon  is jealous. This is our truth. We’re going to miss everything beneath this sky, even cotton, even rock There’s a broken bridge in your hometown I want to see you as a child running there. I want to catch you before you hit the ground.

I won’t lie, this hurts more than you’ll ever know.

Today I got interviewed, hired, and then given a dollar raise and a better store location because the interviewer “liked my attitude”