hometowns have a thousand little ghosts pushing through the pavement that trip you up wherever you go how are we meant to live like that
on my way out of my hometown i’m torn between: “i have too many ghosts here” and “i don’t have enough ghosts anywhere else”.. a haunting doesn’t always have to be bad. it can be a light in my childhood best friend’s window after she moved away seven years ago.. it can be the smell of lilacs in spring that just don’t smell the same in another state.. it can be seeing an old classmate’s parent in line at the grocery store and being given a hug. there are small joys in tripping over my ghosts. sometimes the ghosts love me as much as they hate me.. but either way they’re proof i’ve lived. i left a fingerprint on the world here. small as it might be..
No matter how attractive a person’s potential may be, you have to date their reality.
I fall asleep and my mind gives itself to you like the way the night curls around the moon. You place poetry at the tip of my tongue, only to steal it away with one kiss, and I’m left wordless—breathless, gasping for life. I have no desire for anything that isn’t you.
Someone once asked me: “how did you know you were in love with him?” I wasn’t sure how to explain it at first. Then, without thinking, I said: “I felt more at peace in his presence than I did without him. When I’m with him my soul is at peace and I feel at home in a way I never have before. When I realized that the peace and the sense of belonging that I had been deprived of and have been craving most of my life, I had sincerely found it while I was with him, without him even trying, that’s when I knew. That’s when I knew, this is love. I was in love.”
You can’t love someone you don’t understand because you would not know how to love a person you fail to comprehend. Trying to convince yourself that someone loves you “in their own way” is simply cognitive dissonance. That is not love. To truly love someone is to love them in THEIR way, and you can only do this is by understanding them and knowing how they need to be loved. This is true intimacy.
