I lived through the quietest, most calamitous year of my life.
I fell in love with a boy with long eyelashes and perfect teeth and a high, sweet laugh who made me feel like I’d swallowed the sun.
I fell in love with a boy with long eyelashes and perfect teeth and a high, sweet laugh who broke my heart quietly and coolly, like it was nothing at all.
Under a perfect October sky, I became someone else’s New York story, my long limbs folded into one of those tiny, green tables in Bryant Park.
I told a very good man that the only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to marry him.
I moved into a small apartment, one wall made entirely of windows. I felt my way back to myself.
I moved west.
I got my dream job.
I found a small, perfect, hundred-year-old house on a street named for a town on the Carolina coast.
I kissed a man outside the Ted Lasso pub in London after drinking too much wine and dancing with his friend in front of a hundred strangers.
Twice I learned that when a man tells you he can’t see you every day, what he really means is he never wants to see you again.
I got the bones in place, I think.
I started drinking cold foam in my morning latte.
I bought a record player, finally.
I spent a year feeling like someone was taking a melon scooper to my chest – slowly and methodically scooping everything out.
I whispered, It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter in a silent, infinite loop – those three words becoming the quietest, most desperate lie I ever told myself.
I stopped writing.
And then I forgot how to write.
And then I thought I couldn’t.
I forgot that writing is a way to stave off madness. To say the things that cannot be said. To make what begins to feel imagined real again (alchemy). A way to say, this happened, this was important.
I forgot that it is a way to split one’s self in two, to bear witness, with great love, to one’s own life – messy and imperfect and, in ways that are still wholly unclear, important.
It’s a love story. It was always a love story.