Three years ago
my best friend died.

He got too close to the water,
they said,
and they named it "accidental".
And that was that.

I never bought that.
I think he just..
gave up.
I couldn't tell you why,
not an answer
you would accept anyway.
Just a feeling that lives
deep in my soul.
A feeling that tells me
that he knew
what his decision would mean,
and he jumped.

Took all my secrets
and demons with him.
He took
all the things
I'd only ever told him,
and he buried them,
then he left me here.
Without him.

I've never felt that kind of pain before.

I thought
I'd felt it all.
But I was wrong.

That night I sat on my floor,
listening to the same song on repeat.
The tears refused to stop,
along with the shakes,
so I got drunk
and tried not to feel.

But that didn't work either.
So I drank more.
Cried more.
Smoked another cigarette

and I tried to write him down.

But I just stared at the screen.
Blank.
Waiting for words that never came.
I think I thought
that if I wrote it down,
it would be too real.
It would mean that he was really gone,
that there was no going back.
And if it was real,
then I would have to miss him.
I would have to let myself feel that..
And I wasn't ready for that.

So I told myself that
I would wait to write him down,
wait until
I didn't miss him so much.

I would wait until the words came.

But they never came.
No words came.
Eventually
I refused to write at all
until I could write my best friend down,
until I could tell OUR story.

But suddenly,
three years had come and gone,
and I didn't miss him
any less,
and I didn't write
any more stories,
and it didn't change anything.

At all.

i'd wait around
all night
for you to
come around
lay your sweet head down
upon my chest
and breathe with me.
just for a little while.

let me love you.

and i don't think i've ever felt this way
for quite some time...
and i'd let you
i'd let you
sink deeper into me
while you let sleep take over you
and let my heart consume you.

let you love me.

I fell in love with a boy, once.
A boy with brown eyes.
They didn't sparkle.
And they didn't gleam.
They were brown.
Simple, ordinary brown.
And this boy was an ordinary boy.
He didn't speak beautiful words.
He didn't sweep me off my feet,
or sing me love songs.
His kiss didn't send fireworks through my veins.
Nor did his touch make me shake.
He was simply ordinary.
I was never undeniably addicted to him.
Never felt my heart in his hands,
or felt his soul in my chest.
He was what he was.
I was what I was to him.
We were what we were,
at that moment,
when neither one of us wanted to mean something to someone else,
when neither one of us wanted to feel.
We, as we were, were ordinary.
They will never write love stories about us.
And he will quickly forget about me once I am gone.
Because to him, I was ordinary too.
He never dreamt of me.
I was never what he felt he's been missing all this time.
I was just a girl with blue eyes.
Blue eyes that didn't sparkle.
Eyes that he never thought to gleam.
Ordinary blue eyes.
But now and again,
part of me thinks that maybe he fell in love with me too.
Some moments I think that maybe,
well maybe the fact that we didn't say much was okay,
maybe it was okay that we were ordinary.
I always thought I wanted this extraordinary love affair,
filled with this insane, violent, addictive passion.
Where we hated each other,
yet we couldn't survive with the other,
where we couldn't breathe without the other's breath.
I thought I needed someone who would take responsibility
for whether my heart was capable of beating or not.
But then I fell in love with a boy,
a boy with ordinary brown eyes,
who spoke ordinary, quiet words.
A boy who touched me in an ordinary way,
who took ordinary breaths, at even intervals.
I fell in love with a stupid, ordinary boy.

I honestly thought that without you,
I would die.
Not die,
in the literal sense,
that’s far too dramatic.
I don’t want to admit that without you,
I couldn’t survive.
But I thought…

well I kind of did think that.


I thought that my heart wouldn’t beat without you,
that my breathing would become shallow and weak.
I thought that the sun would burn out,
and the sky would come crashing to the ground.
I expected time to stop,
noise to cease existence.
I thought…

well I thought that without you,
everything would just grow quiet.
Lonely.
Sad.
Quiet.
But it didn’t.
Nothing changed.
Nothing stopped.
The world survived you.
So,
quietly and bravely,

I decided that I would too.

I loved you.
There.
I said it.
Wrote it down.
It's real now.
I loved you.
And I still love you.
Love the silly look on your face
when you realize you've said something that made me laugh.
Me.
The dutchess of the straight face.
The queen of the dead pan.
And I love that stupid smirk when I've bested you.
When I've gotten to the punch line before you even knew
What the punch line was.
And I miss you.
Miss us.
The way we were.
Back when you let yourself admit that I had stolen your heart
The heart you had sworn to never give away.
I miss that.
Miss the times I'd lay on your chest
And we'd laugh at the little things.
Miss the way you'd glance at me, and I'd catch you.
Better yet
When you'd catch me.
But I was never any good at playing coy.
Not when it counted.
And you knew that.
And you loved it.
Maybe just liked it.
But somewhere
Deep in your head
I like to think you considered
Falling in love with me.
Even if
Now
It's too late for it to matter.
I like to think you considered loving me.
And when it comes to you.
That's enough.
That will always be enough for me.

It's such a strange thing,
falling in love,
and the way the things you fall in love with,
change with the seasons,
or as various lovers even strangers,
enter and exit our existence,
as time passes.
And it's extraordinary how love
seems to warp time.
How it moves too slowly
when love is sad,
but far too quickly
when the love is good,
how you fall in and out of love
faster than you can say the words,
or the tears can form
on the inside corners of the eyes.
The tears that don't ever fall,
but linger just long enough
to melt the mascara on the fine lashes,
that only seem to be evident
during moments like these.
The moments when people look most like themselves.
Moments of weakness.
The same moments when you realize
that the movies are liars,
and songs are rarely written from truth.
Because people don't find their soulmates
in the spontaneous moments of passing,
but in the everyday moments.
Real people don't fall in love
during the dramatic, desperate, lonely moments
but the quiet
simple moments.
For I once fell in love with a beautifully ordinary boy
as he slept soundly
on the other side of my mattress at 4am.
Because he'd never shown me
any of the private memories he had survived
and that night he'd told me everything,
and whispered that without me
he always slept, but couldn't dream.
And once during a quiet evening
on a couch,
in a small town in Connecticut,
in front of Lord of the Rings,
while we'd laughed about all the things,
we'd somehow forgotten to laugh about
over the course of growing older.
And then a third time in your car,
on a rainy afternoon
while we had danced horrendously and sang off key
to an old mix you had burned back in
God knows when.
Where you knew every line,
and I'd rolled down the windows
despite the rain,
to hold my arm out like I was flying,
like we had when we were kids,
and you had smiled at me like I was magic..
These have been the moments in which
I have fallen in love.
Never during the movie-esque moments,
but in the ordinary moments.
The moments in which,
I never expected to fall in love at all.