My head tucks neatly under his chin like maybe we’re Russian nesting dolls from the same set.

But that’s not how pain works… You ignore it and it just sinks down deeper. It lodges itself in the corners of our memories, hangs off tree branches on Callawassie Drive. It hides under the pews in the back row of the church. It gets caught in a pile of sheets no one knew what to do with.

He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up. He’s the song no parent ever loved me enough to sing. He’s the way water runs and bubbles over stones in a stream. He’s a quiet mind.

A romantic endgame is something I’ve spent much of my adult(ish) life considering. It sounds ominous, and I guess it is in some ways, but so is love if you’re doing it properly. Ominous and hopeful in one fell swoop.

where there’s something in front of me waiting to be realized, but my consciousness hasn’t figured it out yet, and my subconscious doesn’t know how to communicate it to me either.

Our relational pattern, until now, would have him believe that he can say or do anything he wants to me and we’ll just…rubber-band back to being who we were before it happened. He is right—kind of. But elastic wears over time. It stretches more, gets thinner, loses its shape. Even when you want it to snap back to what it was, it doesn’t always work

but the farther away from it I was, the easier it was to ignore.

The idea that it ends—that it all ends—that everything you spend your life doing and building toward one day amounts to actually nothing the second you take your last breath.

Conscious feelings are present on the surface, and you make decisions around them, but subconscious feelings exist under the surface, and they dictate your decisions too, arguably even more so, but often you only realize that in retrospect.