The library. Sobriety. The steady click-clack of keys beneath my fingers. The summer. Strong coffee and a little milk. The A$AP Rocky album. A bunch of pieces in my mind; the character, that story, that man; coming together.

The quiet, the quiet, the quiet. The becoming, the becoming, the becoming.

You’re in love with two people who aren’t really there.

One left and so you made him your ghost. You still talk to him after all this time. You know it’s not really him. Who cares who he is now? Who cares who you thought he was then? He cheers you on from the sidelines, he watches you quietly. He’s proud of who you’ve become, he tells you that all the time. He's why you've become who you've become.  He’s someone who’d be there if he could. It's not sad anymore. It just is.

The other man you love is close to coming for you. You know that he loves you. You think that you love him, too. You thought so the second you met him. But it’s almost been a year since that moment, so what’s taking him so long? He’s scared, you think. That’s okay, you tell yourself. I understand being scared. You feel the inevitability of him, like seasons changing. You remember how his hand held yours the last time you slept in his bed.

I am really happy.

Right Choices Wrong People

You have permission to take an eraser to the past two years. You sucked the blood from that stone. You don’t have to be haunted anymore.

So yes, choose to fall madly in love. The next time, go in with your eyes open. Do it with the right person.

You will go visit a rock star while he’s on the road in North Carolina. Yes, you’re young (ish), so having romantic adventures is the right thing to do. He’s not the right person to do it with. He has problems you've known too well. The similarities frighten you.

Wait four months. 

Something good is coming your way.

Losing him taught me people die two deaths.

Once, when they're heart stops beating and again when you stop speaking their name.

I keep dreaming of babies and apparently that means new beginnings. 

I still have the kind of anxiety about him as I do panic about my curling iron. I will be at a meeting and then I’ll have a sudden flash of my house burning down. Did I turn it off? I left it on, didn’t I? No, it’s off, I remember turning it off. About him, it will be the middle of the night and I’ll wake up with, what if I had done that one thing different? Did I really have the say that? 

For the record, I have never returned home to my things in flames. And no, I didn’t really have to say that.