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We loved like it would never end because we had never loved before and we had never ended before. We never saw it coming. And when it did, we kept trying to rebuild from the wreckage but each time the foundation was less sure.

For years, we destroyed parts of each other and pieces of ourselves. We didn't even know what we were fighting for in the end.

You have someone. I have someone too.

Don't do this to me again.

You touched me so much tonight.

If I could say anything to you at all

I would tell you,

You're the one who got away but

I’m not the same person I was when you first loved me.

Back then, we fell into it. Tumbling. Limbs knocking together before finding their places. We could look into each other’s eyes and say the words. We could lay on your mattress on the floor with your ill-fitting sheets and I could touch the bones of your hips and kiss the spot behind your ear. I could feel your skin. I had you. You were mine. You could bite my lip and grab my ass and wrap your hand around my neck. I was yours. 

Seventeen. 

At seventeen, we were invincible. 

I read once that your first love hurts the most because you haven’t yet experienced its loss. You haven’t tasted the sting. You haven’t yet ripped your soul into two separate pieces. So, you love as though it will never cause you pain. You love freely. And when it’s gone, you’re different. Now you’ve tasted the sting. Now your soul has been ripped in half, and you will never love the same way again.

When I fell in love with you for the second time, it was not the same. It couldn’t be. I had already seen the ugliest parts of you. You carried the pain of my leaving and never looking back. We were hesitant. We stepped lightly. This time, there was no freedom. No limbs for us to wrap together, no bones, no ill-fitting sheets, no ears to kiss, no biting lips. You were not mine. I was not yours. 

Thirty-one. 

There’s a reason no one writes songs about thirty-one. There is no magic here. The choices have been made. 

My choices have been made. 

I sit with my choice to walk away. I sit with my choice to not look back. I sit with the happiness that I found in another. 

I sit with my fractured soul. 

I sit with seventeen-year-old me and I say to her, “Why did you give up on him?”

I sit and hear her voice say back to me, “Because he made you give up on yourself.”

one of my favorite sounds is snowflakes hitting the ground. if the word ‘peace’ had a sound, i think that would be it. 

it reminds me of being fifteen, lying on my back on a hill near my house where we had gone sledding. he hadn’t shown up, but i had hoped he would. it was dark. there were others there, but they were far away. all i could hear was the sound of snowflakes. 

i think of all of the paths i could have chosen

i walk down each one in my mind

his road would have made me a lonely military wife, a woman screaming for attention, her voice drowned out by craft beer and vodka

his road wouldn’t have made me a wife at all, a girl dying for commitment, her heart shattered and pieced together again and again

his road would have made me a Godly wife, his road a bored wife, his road, that road, those roads