I remember every single patient who I’ve cared for. Their faces are stored away in my mind and I see them when I lie awake at night, when my brain won’t switch off because of the back- to-back shifts. I wonder how they are, if they ever followed that dream they spoke of. If they go out and do all of the normal things someone of their age should be doing.
I sat there staring at this stream of horny men’s crude messages and I ached for my ex, who even in his dirtiest of texts would have never, ever disrespect me.
I wish I didn’t need you. But I wished for you, oh darling, I wished for you every time I blew out a candle or pulled seeds from a dandelion. I prayed for you as those tiny feathered seeds scattered the sun-lit fields in late September.
It’s like you live everywhere; there’s ghosts of me and you kissing on park benches and holding hands by the river. There’s memories of you locked away inside my mind and I have no control of where and when I find the key.
You’ll discover that your greatest love in life is the touch of your pen to paper and the freedom you feel when the ink flies across the white canvas. Words will save you.
I love you after too many glasses of wine, when I’m clutching onto your hand and stumbling along the pavement, my heels catching uneven ground and you laugh and call me your ‘baby giraffe’ before pressing your lips to my cheek.
It was a different kind of heartbreak. Not like losing a boyfriend; it still lingers deep inside me. It doesn’t fade.
Some days my desire to be a writer is both a blessing and a curse. I seek the often unattainable.
I thought, ‘I love you’ would save me somehow. Instead I find myself tongue-tied whenever I look into your eyes and feel the words, desperate to escape my lips, but for whatever reason, they can’t.
This place, where we laughed like school children, kissed like it was both the first time and the last time, and never ran out of things to say, was everything. Is everything, still.