one day someone will mention your name and i will say to myself i used to know him, i think

i hope that it will feel like smelling a familiar scent and realizing days later that it was the smell of your estranged childhood best friend’s home.

a gentle, nostalgic reminder that bears no weight of past disaster. i don’t want to forget you completely; i want to remember you like that.

i want a love so effortless it feels like breathing; something you don’t have to think about, something you do because you have to in order to stay alive. i want someone to kiss me while they’re half asleep without thinking about it and pull me closer, hold me tighter. i want dreamy mornings where the light streams in through the windows, and it looks like you can cut the sun rays with a knife, and everything is golden and the room is filled with a love so strong you can smell it, hear it, taste it— and it smells like homemade chocolate chip cookies, and it sounds like a hot summer night, and it tastes like strawberries and champagne. i don’t want to be someone’s favorite person, i want to be half of someone. i want someone to think of me when they think of themselves— to be so intertwined with their self image in their own mind that the idea of being without me would be inconceivable. i want a love that is gentle and kind and not painful and not hard. a love that feels like a forehead kiss, like gentle back scratches. i want someone to love my cat because i love her, even if they hate cats. i want to make pillow forts and light candles and dance in the kitchen to frank sinatra. i want to be someone’s home. i want a love that makes everyday feel like sunday morning, like nothing bad has happened in the world and no one exists besides us, and the biggest problem we have to face is should we make dinner or order in. a love where the worst pain we have to deal with is laughing so hard our stomachs ache and our cheeks hurt. a love that feels like mid-july, laying out at the beach and swirling hot sand with your fingers and running into the ocean holding hands. when i get out of bed i want to see tangled linen bed sheets and the imprint of two tangled bodies, and i want to be able to look at it and say love slept here, love lives here.

hey (with the intention of finding some wet cement and writing our names in a heart)

the sunset is teeming through my windows painting my walls orange and i haven’t showered yet because i smell like you

there is something so divinely feminine about sitting in the dark with a boy anxiously waiting to be kissed

It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came.

~ Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

i sing myself to sleep with elegies of you, and keep myself up with iambics of you, and i think to myself; if i said any of this aloud, sung it like a lullaby to a child, it would sound an awful lot like hell and heaven colliding

i am choosing to let go of him in an attempt to recover some piece of myself that got lost among all the nights spent longing for him, spent staring at my ceiling, spent crying and fruitlessly begging for answers— but in so doing, i can’t shake the feeling that i am doing something irrevocable and wrong. like i’m giving up. and i see things that say “the right one will never give up on you” and it makes me feel like i have committed some cruel and unusual crime for which the punishment is eternal and chronically painful. for which the punishment is an eternity without him, or an eternity of him thinking that i wasn’t the right one because i gave up. but the reality is i tried, i tried so damn hard, i flailed and wailed and grasped for anything i could hold onto that could give me a reason to stay, and it was like trying to hold air or water or trying to keep a butterfly in your pocket for later, contributing to its untimely death. and i failed, time and time again, i failed and lived in that failure alone, breathed it in every breath i took, bathed in it, saw it everywhere, especially the mirror. it was mine— it became the only thing that was mine. i carried it, i carried it in solitude, i carried it in sickness and in health and through good times and bad, and it was heavy— it still is, i still own it, it’s still mine. it kills without rhyme or reason, and it’s killing is ironic because i cultivated it out of love, accidentally but surely. in order to rid myself of this murderous failure i had to give up on him, so how is it fair that i feel like i’m damned, like i have committed an act of treachery? how is living with this any better than dying of the other?

carmen is literally effy's song

i am not very good at holding on to people

if you hold something beautiful for too long it will break. such is life. everything ends. the brightest stars die. sometimes there is no new beginning. sometimes it is just the end, and it is just dark.

i am starting to think i just like to be hurt. haha

Natalie Díaz, from “I, Minotaur”, Postcolonial Love Poem