The Seven Year Slip

Because the things that mattered most never really left.

The love stays.

The love always stays, and so do we.

“I dreamed so much of you.”

“How’s reality?” I asked, myself around him, never wanting to let him go.

“Fuck, so much better.”

“What do you tell people, when they ask about it?”

His shyness melted into a smile, warm and gooey like chocolate. “I tell them about a girl I fell in love with at the right place but the wrong time.”

A knot lodged in my throat. “And what are you going to tell them now?”

“That we finally got the timing right.”

“A matter of time,” I whispered.

“A matter of timing,” he proposed

He’d gotten a lemon flower tattooed over his heart.

I could listen to the way his tongue wrapped around the letters of my name for the rest of my life

I love you, Lemon

he slowly turned me to a blank space on the wall in the middle of the restaurant. “It’s for you, if you ever find the inspiration to put something there.”

There was never grief without love or love without grief

She never wanted anyone to see the monster on her shoulder, so she hid it, and when she finally took the monster’s hand, it broke our hearts.

I’d be so caught up with wishing he was who he’d been that I failed to see who he had become