Breathless

“Fight for your dreams, and your dreams will fight for you.”

“SHE WORE a sunflower dress and on the first day that you saw her, you fell in love. Over time, she fell in love with you too. She taught you what it was to live, with her wildness and her melodic laughter. And you taught her how to love. It wasn’t always easy. There were nights when she would wake up screaming and you would hold her close, and stroke her hair until she fell back asleep. There were mornings when she would be distant. A few times, you thought about leaving. Over Winter, when she cried almost every day and your presence hardly seemed to matter to her anymore. Over Easter, when you fought constantly. But there were periods of sunshine too. And it was during these times that you remembered the sunflower dress. “I loved that dress,” you told her, one July evening. “Really?” she laughed in that characteristic way of hers. “Yes.“ The next week, she wore it for the first time in a year, to meet your family. She looked so happy that you couldn’t help but laugh. You couldn’t help but love her. It is these moments that you think about now - now that she is gone. The sunflower dress and her melodic laughter. The way that you loved her. The sunflowers in your back garden sway in the breeze. You wonder whether she still wears them when she feels happy. You hope that she does.”

“I hope you get where you’re going, and be happy when you do it.”

““It didn’t work out” I guess those are just sort of four words that make you feel numb even when they shouldn’t. They’re the way love ends and the way your heartache story begins. You’ll look back on it a few years from now. Your hair is a lot shorter now and you’ve stopped biting your nails and you run into someone who knew you back then. Back when you were seventeen and you were his. And they’ll ask how you are and how you’ve been and what happened? What happened. Because oh god you were so in love. The kind of love that you don’t think ever goes away, until it does. So you’ll play it all back in your head even though you haven’t thought about it in years and it’ll rush back and wash over you and you’ll take every “I love you” and every hard kiss and every intertwined finger and wrap it all up and press it between the letters of the words “it didn’t work out.” You won’t talk about the first night you met and how you’ve never laughed so hard in your life. You won’t talk about sleeping on his bedroom floor incase his mother came into the room. You won’t bring up the way he made it feel like you weren’t going to die and with him, you never wanted to. You can’t even remember why it ended. Everything you were and everything you had is gone. It just didn’t work out. But you know that it could have.”

“I am blooming from the wound where I once bled.”

“The words that escape a friend’s mouth are “I’ll be there when you say you need me” but the words that are unheard from a true friend’s heart are “I’ll be there… whether you say you need me or not.””

Saying goodbye to someone you love that doesn’t love you back might be one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do.