thank god i hadn’t met you at seventeen, when i would’ve spilled my blood at your feet and looked up and asked, what else?, let you run away with every part of me, take the HeLa cells and start life all over without my permission. thank god i found your shoreline after i had already learned the difference between staying afloat by clinging to someone else’s life raft and swimming on my own through the stormy seas and pulling undercurrents. thank god you didn’t have to see me broken, wondering if the pieces ever fit together in the first place, terrified that there would always be ugly seams in the places i stitched myself back together the only ways i knew how.
i count my lucky stars you weren’t there the night my mom packed up and left, leaving a silence behind that still lingers heavy in our house that doesn’t feel like home. i’ll never know which four leaf clover or wishing coin or streaking comet finally heard me, but i am grateful it didn’t listen when i begged for love at seventeen. what would i have done with a gift like that, with a presence like yours? probably too much and not enough all at once, smothered it and ignored it all the same, held it too tight or let it go with those claw marks all over it. pushed when i meant to pull, taken when i actually wanted to give, left when i didn’t know how to stay.
i like to think of us as an inevitability: if not now, we would have happened eventually. my hands would have found yours in the backseat of our friend’s car, you would’ve bumped into me in the darkness of a dance floor. but to me the miracle is that we came together when we did, not a moment too soon, not so long apart that we found other people. thank god the third time is the charm. thank god for good timing. thank god i fell in love with you at twenty-three.
prguitarman
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines
ellievsbear
vaporwave
