courage, dear heart.

““I hope we last. I hope we do. But if we don’t, this is how I want you to remember me: I want you to remember me curled up, listening to the sound of your heartbeat and tracing maps across your skin. Remember me laughing at your jokes, even the stupid ones. Remember me in hysterics for absolutely no reason and in tears because one time you made me so sad neither of us thought I’d recover. Remember me brave, that time you held my hand and I thought I was going to die; remember me scared and gentle and delicate and breakable - only for you though, only for you. Remember me happy, and all the ridiculous ways I tried to get your attention. Remember the way I was too stubborn to talk to you and how absolutely insane it drove the both of us. Remember all the firsts and how they were so delightful we went back for seconds and thirds and fourths. Remember the songs you couldn’t stop listening to and the childish dreams you allowed yourself about the future. If it’s any consolation I allowed myself to have them too. If it comes to it I don’t want you to remember the ending. Remember the beginning. Remember the first time you knew.”

““I think we had something.” She said, “It wasn’t love, but it wasn’t nothing either. “And perhaps it was just stolen glances in long corridors, and laughing a little too much at each other’s ridiculous jokes.” “Perhaps it was just feeling giddy at touching knees and pausing before breathing their name. “And I know that it wasn’t love,” she said, “but it could have been. I’m sure at another time, in another place, it could have been.””

“He’d never cared much for strawberries, but that summer her lips were so stained with the juices that they were all he tasted. And he’d never had a favourite fruit, but two years later, a new girl is sat in front of him, laughing at his jokes. “If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” She asks playfully. Suddenly he remembers how her hands traced the veins in his neck and made their way across his chest. He remembers her soft breathing and limbs draped across his shoulders. “Strawberries.” He tells her. “I could live a life on nothing but strawberries.””

I remember being in a taxi somewhere, close to Annunciation Street. I was drunk, getting a ride home from the bar.