“People don’t look real. Their eyebrows look like they’re airbrushed. They’re like cartoons. Everything is so perfect. They look computer-generated because they live on the internet. They live in photographs. Marie-Antoinette lived inside Versailles. If you weren’t there, you didn’t see how insane it was, and there was still a revolution. Now you’re seeing all these people - their boats and planes and jewels and cars and clothes. I’m turned off by the excess of it - and I live in that world.”
Being slow in life is fine. Taking longer to figure life out than others is not a bad thing. Lots of super successful people were late bloomers, who knows what amazing things you could accomplish once you heal more.
hiii! could i request a charles fluff where he and y/n kinda have like some tradition that they do together or something. and its just special to them? like going traveling or even something ordinary like cleaning the house? sorry i'm a total sucker for these lmao
again late, so late, sorry! but i am trying to catch up w these olddd reqs hahshdhs. shoutout again to mack who live messaged me ab a grocery trip and inspired much of this ily. title from this
things lovers do – cl16
“And we’re out of limes, I think.” You say, humming as you review the contents of your fridge.
“Do we even use them that much?” Charles asks from the dinner table. He stares at the list, where he’s written the word limes. He holds a pen to the left of it, prepares to draw it across the word, but your own words of protest stop him. What—of course we use limes, you say.
“I don’t recall us making guacamole, is all.”
You shut the fridge, laughing and walking over to where he sits, wrapping your arms around him from behind. Together, you peruse the crumpled list, of words written and erased in Charles’ messy penmanship. There’s romaine, lemon, pasta, ciabatta. Assorted gum, because Charles likes to chew it while working. Coffee beans, because a day without them renders you half-deceased.
This is a weekly thing—reviews of the grocery list, on the dinner table with two glasses of wine. Anyone can love, but not everyone can sit and be patient and browse every last item of the fridge and pantry to determine what needs to be added. And through the list you’re provided with a window for the week: Monday night dinner with pasta, Wednesday breakfast with ciabatta, a romaine salad for Thursday brunch.
If you told your six-year-old self that your best memories with your boyfriend would be formulating grocery lists, she would pout in your face. Boyfriend? She’d ask petulantly. Don’t we get to marry a prince, with a horse and a castle? No, you’d say. We get to have a prince, yes, but he has a car and a house in Monaco. Is that good enough? If it isn’t, he makes a mean set of pancakes.
Do we get to dance with him at a ball? It’s still a no, you’d tell her. The dancing happens in the kitchen, lit only by the yellow of the stovetop range while you play Harvest Moon and sway softly to the guitar. It happens by the fridge, when a Bee Gees song comes on and Charles can’t resist holding you by the waist and lifting you up to join his dancing. It happens while you wait for toast in the morning, when both the bread and the weather are in the middle of cool and warm, to Al Green on the radio.
This love of grocery lists and airplane rides sure doesn’t live up to your six-year-old self’s fairytale standards, or your sixteen-year-old’s hopes of marrying Harry Styles. You think, however, that it far surpasses anything you could ever have wanted.
His voice draws you out of your reverie. “You okay? You’re a bit quiet.”
“Just thinking,” you reassure, pressing a kiss to his hair and smiling. “Of things.” Of us, of toast and tea, of romance and loving you and making lists and loving you and God, loving you. “Lots of things.”
“…Is this because I added too much junk food?”
“No, God,” you say, fond. “It’s nothing.”
“I love you,” he says back. And if you ever doubted it, there would always be limes, written without erasure on this crumpled list on the dinner table.
My therapist was so real for saying the meaning of life is found in connection.
People hug their friends when they meet up and hug them a little tighter when it comes time to say goodbye. My grandfather rebuilt the broken rocking horse my grandmother had as a child, a gift from her father. There's an indescribable ache that goes along with seeing someone you used to know intimately, the becoming of a common stranger. Coincidences that bind, one time I got an uber and the driver used to live in my home before me. It was the last place he saw his father alive as a child and he nearly cried when I told him the walls were still the same colour.
Has anyone ever gotten over their childhood best friend? Is that alone not a testament to the fact we are more than blood and bones.
