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21 " Imagine somewhere there is a poem that tastes like our goodbye felt. Biting down on foil, swallowing an unexpected mouthful of ocean water. Too much of a good thing: cotton candy, soda pop, licking chocolate icing from the jar. Acidic throat. A stomach ache. I have given up trying to write it. I don’t need to hold onto it anymore "
― Trista Mateer , Honeybee
22 " Now I am keeping windowsill plants just to prove to myself that things can still grow out of neglect. And I understand the reasons she left. It is hard to keep trying to fix something convinced it is not broken. It is hard to love a heart that is not always open. "
23 " I am the one physically removing myself from this place and yet it feels like you are the one leaving me. I will never understand how this works "
24 " You can call it a sin when we kissand you only hear the word unholyin your mother's voice.What a slow way to die, baby.Day after day after day. "
25 " I am different more often than I am the same.I don't know how anybody falls in love with me.I don't know how anybody keeps up. "
26 " I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking for the last three months. I am sick of the length of my hair and the reasons I have to keep my nails short. I keep forgetting how to breathe. I keep forgetting how to be kind to myself. I need to remember to berate myself with my inside voice, to pick myself apart quietly instead of making such a big fuss about breaking. Last year when I went to see the doctor about wanting to bloom the skin on my wrists, she told me that I just needed to make changes. "Everybody feels like this at some point. You are not special; this is normal; everything will be okay. "
27 " The night you told me that the more people I kissed, the dirtier I would become (like a little Play-Doh girl with her colors all mixed up), was the first time I wondered why anyone would ever want to put their mouth on your skin "
28 " I thought I could walk away from love and it would let me. "
29 " Love was a museum where we took down the art that was there before us and played masterpiece with all the empty space. "
30 " When I stop getting tripped up by your crooked heart and your small hands, I will want to go over all of your poems with white out. I will want to rinse your name out of my mouth, snuff out all the evidence that I thought the sun and moon of you because the world was not enough. "
31 " Did you know that when a star implodes, for a few days, it can be brighter than an entire galaxy? I still have light in my eyes from the way that you left me; I still wait for my core to collapse like a black hole and suck everything into it when I meet someone else with your name. "
32 " I slept incredibly well before I met you. "
33 " She does not remind me of anything;everything reminds me of her. "
34 " No one will ever be able to knock the wind out of me again. Not like that.Not like you. "
35 " You may have been part of the healing but you don't get to be part of what's healed. "
36 " That is okay. It is okay to leave. It is okay to feel smothered by the weight of a life you didn't want or a relationship that doesn't taste the way you thought it would. It does not make you hard or disagreeable or unreasonable. "
37 " Some people will leave you. It will have everything to do with you and nothing to do with outside circumstances. You cannot sugarcoat it. You cannot dress it up and make it feel sweet or soft or warm. And it’s going to hurt you. I know your instinct will be to beg them to stay, to unpack their bags for them, to curl up by their wandering feet—but people are going to leave you. That is okay too. "
38 " It took me too long to realize it was not romantic(, tender, or healthy) to love someone else more than I loved myself. "
39 " pick you apart like puzzle pieces, stick my fingers in your cracks and split you open to see the inside because I am so damn naive that I am always expecting a sweet, soft center even when there’s none to be had. You did not want to be smashed open and dived greedily into. You pressed your mouth to my fingers and toes, wrote prose into my palms where every other line began with “No” and ended with a reason that you could not bear to stay. "
40 " When you took the scissors I had pressed into your palms and cut our strings, I slipped out of step like a ruined marionette. I did not know how to cope with myself, did not know how to handle me-without-you. "