20 Steps I’ll Take After You Leave
1. If I could put all of the hurt you have caused me into you, you would cry. If you knew how it felt when you don’t answer, you would answer, every time. Even just friends need each other sometimes, you know. This is the first step.
2. And she wrote, today I miss you. Today, I am not as strong as I was yesterday. Today I remember too much. Tomorrow, I will move on again. Tomorrow won’t have you and that will be just fine. Tomorrow will not be wrong for lacking you. But for today, now, for this moment, I miss you, and if I thought you missed me too, I would tell you. I would tell you until I didn’t have to miss you anymore. I would tell you until you finally heard me. That is how I feel today. Tomorrow, tomorrow I will be strong again. I’m sorry it can’t be everyday.
3. I can’t decide if you leaving was brave or cowardly. Maybe, maybe it was both. Neither of us will ever know if the other is really sorry.
4. Sometimes I wonder if love lies asleep inside of us. Does love for someone really ever leave us? It wakes up sometimes and we go, oh. There it is. Is it ever going to leave? Maybe not. Serendipity means a happy accident.
5. As we were loading the car you called me babe. It was a moment that you acknowledged and I chose to move right through, a spark of beauty through the everything else that I slid right past. It was not my spark to dwell on. It was not my beauty to hold. It used to be. It would never be. Sparks are only dangerous if you fuel them.
6. “We’ve got to get together sometime,” they say. Nobody really means it though. We’ve got to stop doing that, saying things we don’t mean.
7. I know you remember when you grab my hand, absent mindedly, in public. Someone had said let’s go, and you grabbed my hand, like a question, your fingers remembering and then really remembering, pulling away. Hearts are meant to break sometimes, and so hearts are going to break. You broke my heart but you are not broken. You still know how to love and you still know how to care. So you will be my friend, my dear, even though you broke our hearts.
8. I’m scared to let you go. I want you, but not like this.
9. His friend said, girl, he is poison. And my heart sobbed, because someone finally understood.
10. Forever hit a speed bump. Forever had a busy schedule and wandering eyes. Forever became too close to another girl. All of my favorite songs are telling you not to go.
11. Someone loves the bad guy, you know.
12. Her hand is in your hair, and my hand is in my heart, pulling off the pieces that you’ve touched. I’ve touched your hair like that. Like she does. Like you did, to my heart. She and I have nothing, you say, but if we ever do….I’ll tell you. And I wonder, if maybe you just did.
13. I ask, do you love me, and love says, oh god. I can’t remember. If it doesn’t break your heart, then was it even worth it?
14. I am ready to love you now, he said to her in her dreams.
15. Why is distance so hard for everyone else, but I can always remember what I love about someone?
16. When I’m trying to say something and the words are everywhere, I realize that’s where my heart is too. I don’t know a lot of words for this – I thought it was called love. Sometimes you have to feel something else to realize what you felt before was what you actually wanted.
17. If one hurts we all hurt. If one loves we all love. I haven’t cried enough to be done yet.
18. Someday we’ll all have beautiful children, heartbroken children, children who don’t know what they’re doing. We were once those children, too. When it comes to matters of the heart, I think we still are.
19. It was the loudest silence she had ever heard, and it lacked the peace a good silence should hold. After that moment, silence would never feel peaceful again.
20. I wish I could write my feelings into you. Someday I won’t write about you anymore.