The harsh lines protecting her denim jacket were layered with a zip up hoodie. It was deep blue, heavy like the ocean, but thin and rippled, it’s edges tattered down to strings. A jacket that had seen many sunrises and sunsets, many drunken nights and brazen adventures into the mountains and the desert. Zipped, unzipped, the middle of her did what it wanted in the moment. Skin glistening warm in the dark blue and red night. The firelight shined in her eyes much like the embers she stared at as the night wore on. I had never felt my body pull towards something in my life, but the minute I walked out onto that patio my gut started pulling me towards the fire pit. You could argue it was the cold. You could argue her body was all the electricity I’d ever felt in one moment bottled into her soft glance in my direction as I muddled the soft hum of the evening and stepped onto the back patio.
There’s something to be said that my happiest moments are moments of reflection and clarity.
Driving in the car with the windows rolled down, heater blasting on my feet, joint whistling in the wind in my left hand, my right hand on the wheel. There’s a hum that fills the car like a songbird by your bedside, a comforting silence and a comforting sound all the same.
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I wish it would rain. I wish the sky and the ground were covered in mist and green wetness. I wish my face and chest were always slightly cold and colorless. My pink sheen that normally covered my body would be gone. I would look like a beautiful, carefully crafted and preserved porcelain goddess. I’m at my body’s best in the rain, in the cold. My hips feel stronger, my shoulder blades feel like fireflies, moving and swaying with the sound of the rain, the tide of the wind whistling around me.
Everyone asks me with a look of pain, does it hurt? Their hearts are asking me without an actual word, “the worst that could happen to my heart has happened to yours, does it hurt?” They’re asking me with their eyes, with their hands closed ever so softly around my fingertips, with their lips cold and pursed, terrified of the answer. “Yes it hurt. But it doesn’t anymore.” They don’t believe, they can’t fathom how badly it would hurt. But here I am, sitting across from a person who has their soul entwined with someone else’s and I can say to them with clarity and consciousness, yes it hurt, but it doesn’t anymore. Because I love myself and that’s who I’m looking out for. If I didn’t love myself it would hurt more. But I love myself too much to let it hurt me anymore. Because then I’m putting my heart through pain that will offer no resolution. There’s no point in letting someone else’s actions hurt you if they aren’t willing to not hurt you in the first place. They do not care for you enough and in the way that they should care for you.
You cannot let someone who doesn’t care for you be the determiner of your happiness.
You are all you need.
