Lovelight Farms

And isn’t it silly to love the way someone’s things look like next to yours? Little bits and pieces of lives lived in parallel.

There’s this bar in the city that Luka and I like to go to. The beer is cheap, the floors are sticky, and when I kick the jukebox in the bottom right corner, it’ll play Ella Fitzgerald thirteen times in a row exactly. It’s perfect.

“I’m in love with you,” he says, frustrated and shirtless in my bed. He yells it at me, really, his dark eyebrows angry slashes over his eyes. “I’m in love with you and I want to be with you.”

It’s hard to love someone without restraint. To give yourself over to the swell and pull of it without fear of what might happen. I think it’s only natural to hold a part of yourself back and protect what you can. My mom loved me fiercely, but she also never opened her heart to anyone else. Not after what my dad did. So I think I’ve—I think that’s

“I was checking to see if the barn is locked. What are you two doing?” He squints at Luka, who is still recovering from a heart attack, bent in half. “Is that a pink bat?” “It’s rose gold,” I snap.

“Luka.” “Please,” he sighs. “Please stop talking.”

“What are you— Oh my god.” He cuts off abruptly. He sucks in a sharp breath, probably horrified at my messiness unleashed. Maybe I should have shown him this before he confessed his love. “Is that a fern?”

It took almost a decade, but I finally got my shit together.

“Was it the Fourth of July when he insisted on doing a keg stand and projectile vomited on the side of Beckett’s house?”