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368 pages, Paperback
First published June 28, 2022
𓏲 ₊♡𓂃Love wasn't a whisper in the quiet night.
It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here.⋆𓂃ִֶָ ⊹˚
❥𝓜𝔂 𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓰𝓱𝓽𝓼💭 ˖⁺. ༶ ⋆˙⊹
🌼“…you don't ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you'll pick yourself back up and you'll find that you're okay. That you're going to be okay. And eventually, it'll be true.”🌼
💐“Always. I'm yours, Florence Day,” he said, and kissed my knuckles.
Those words made my heart soar.
“Ardently?”
“Fervently. Zealously. Keenly. Passionately yours.”
“And I'm yours,”💐
Buying books always made me feel better, even if I never read them.
“Love is a celebration of life and death. It stays with you. It lingers, my darlings, long after I'm gone. Listen for me when the wind rushes through the trees.”
“So, thank you for giving me words when I didn't think there were any left. I hope you never stop giving the world your words.”
Standing there in the middle of the dandelion field, looking up into Ben's soft ocher eyes, I began to realize that love wasn't dead, but it wasn't forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe.
“There's nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there's more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”
“Everything that dies never really goes. In little ways, it all stays.”
“You are perfect.”
“Am I?”
“Do I need to repeat myself?”
“As often as I deem necessary.”
Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost- it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn.
I was so fucking sad, and yet there were moments when the tide would go back out and I wasn't drowning anymore in it- and they were all moments, I realized, with Ben.
Because of Ben.
“This is exhausting,” he agreed softly. “All of it. Pretending to be okay while the world changes around you and leaves you behind to sit with whatever loss you found.”
No one had ever thanked me for that before. For trying. Even though I was failing.
Would've, should've, could've.
Hindsight was such a bitch.
A glimmer in the corner caught my eye. I glanced over.
An old woman with beautiful wide brown eyes stood in the doorway to the parlor, her hand outstretched to an elderly man in an orange sweater and brown pants, who took it tightly and kissed her knuckles. They shimmered in that star-glitter way spirits did.
“Now he can give her lilies himself.”
𓏲 ₊♡𓂃“There is no happy ending. There's just... happily living. As best you can.”⋆𓂃ִֶָ ⊹˚
Standing there in the middle of the dandelion field, looking up into Ben’s soft ocher eyes, I began to realize that love wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t forever, either. It was something in between, a moment in time where two people existed at the exact same moment in the exact same place in the universe.