oh darling, let's be adventurers

To The Girl He Loved After Me

I think you’re really pretty.

I used to hate thinking you were really pretty.

I used to wish you were plain; I used to wish you were boring.

I used to wish you had dead bodies in your closet or that your Instagram photos weren’t so freakin’ cute.

Because maybe then he wouldn’t have chosen you.

But a few months ago, I had a life altering realization.

And that is why I’m writing this letter.

I’ve been wanting to have this conversation with you for a while because I feel that I owe you an explanation as to why I was in love with your love for so long.

I know he’s yours now.

But he was once mine.

And we were once happy.

For six months, I was the one who lifted him up and made him feel like a little kid. I was the one racing him down sidewalks and watching him scream I love you at the top of his lungs. I was the one wearing his high school t-shirts and sleeping next to him every other night. I was making him happy.

I was his.

Because you weren’t there.

He had never said your name before.

He had no idea that you even existed.

And I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the days when you were nonexistent.

The months before I heard your name for the first time were the most beautifully tragic months I’ve ever lived through.

I remember the way he looked at me after he heard me sing for the first time. He counted how many times we made eye contact that night and it turned out to be about 30 times… We were kind of ridiculous like that.

I remember when I held his hand for the first time. We were watching a movie in my dorm room when he held his hand out and asked me to lie down next to him. I threw a pillow at his face because I was so embarrassed and shy… but after his third attempt, I took his hand anyway.

I remember when he accidentally told me he loved me almost every single day after we’d been dating for two weeks. I’d say something funny and he’d reply, “Ah… and that’s why I love you.” Then he’d run away screaming, “IT WAS AN ACCIDENT PRETEND I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING!“

I remember the moment I thought I realized he was not the guy I was going to end up with.

I remember being wrong.

I remember watching our love tailspin to rock bottom when I became insecure with the relationship and demanded unrealistic things from him.

I remember leaving him.

I remember regretting it.

I remember feeling so far away from God because I believed He had taken the only true love I’d ever experienced away from me like He was tearing skin from the bone.

I remember not leaving my bed for three months.

I remember hearing your name for the first time.

I remember crying.

A lot.

I remember the bad months just as much as the good months.

And I honestly can’t tell you which ones hurt more.

I sometimes wish I would forget all the sweet facts that make up who he is as a person.

But I memorized them as I’m sure you have.

We both know he’s an introvert who tries exceptionally hard to be an extrovert. We both know he loves capes for some reason. We both know he suffers from occasional crippling anxiety. We both know how much he loves milk. We both know he loves pulling pranks but is also terrified of getting in trouble because he’s a good boy at heart. We both know that he h8s h8ers. And we both know his darling mother means more to him than either of us ever could.

We both know him fairly well.

You more so than I.

But then again, you held his hand much longer than I did.

I never so strongly believed in a love like I believed in him.

He was the one.

Was.

Not too long ago, I moved on and I now believe in a new love.

A steadier love.

And I truly believe there is more than one person out there in the world that we are meant to be with.

Because if there’s only one, then wow, we’re all screwed.

So if I’m no longer in love with him… why did I decide to write this?

Because I want you to know that I feel no resentment toward you.

And that I just really hope you make him happy.

Because that is all I ever wanted to give him.

Happiness.

His happiness meant more to me than my own. I was unable to give him the happiness he needed.

And it almost killed me.

But I hope in the end everything works out better for you.

And I hope you get to be with the love of our lives because you really do deserve to be happy.

I hope that if you ever decide to leave, he’ll love you enough to stop you at the door and kiss you until you decide to stay.

I hope you turn around and promise that you’ll never leave his side.

I hope you don’t make the same mistake I did.

I hope you stay.

Because one of us has to.

And it’s much too late for me.

I hope your love lasts much longer than ours ever did, and I hope you don’t see me as his ex-love who is resentful because I no longer carry his heart around.

I’m merely the girl who was meant to love him right before you came along.

And even though I didn’t know that for a very very long time (I may not have known it until I finished writing this letter), I know it now. And it’s a role I’m not ashamed to play.

Because at least I got him for six months.

At least I had enough time to memorize him completely.

At least I have his love safe in my heart so I can revisit it whenever I miss him.

I do miss him.

A lot sometimes.

But I’m always reassured with the beautiful fact that he has you.

And you won’t leave him.

And that is why I wrote this for you.

Because I think you’re really pretty, and I think it may in fact be forever between you two.

And if you were meant to be his life long love story,

Then I’m just happy to be the prologue.

Love,

The girl he loved before you

Copied from: http://beccatremmel.com/2015/10/26/to-the-girl-he-loved-after-me/

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

tai-korczak:

1. Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.
   
2. Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.
3. Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.
   
4. Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.
   
5. Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.
   
6. Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
   
7. Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.
   
8. Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.
   
9. Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.
   
10. Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.
    
11. Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.
    
12. Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening
    
13. Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.
    
14. Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.
    
15. Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.
    
16. Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.
    
17. Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.
    
18. Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.
    
19. Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.
    
20. Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.
    
21. Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.
    
22. Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.
    
23. Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.
    

(via illusionsneverchanged)

14 Mostly-Productive Things To Do When You’re In A Slump

thefinancialdiet:

1. Go back to every moment when you thought you’d never get up. Every time you yelled at your computer and your computer stared straight back at you like a nun. Every spilled opportunity, stained day, tripped chance. You could’ve done a thousand times better a thousand times, but you didn’t, and you won’t, and everyone’s just trying as isthisokay? as they can.

2. Remind yourself what a slump actually is: A natural dip in morale and productivity after a period of (relative) success. As normal as Newton’s third law.

3. Send an email to the one person you’d trust to repair a spaceship’s centrifuge in a Mars One situation. The person whose Gchats are better than Xanax. The person who makes your blood krump down your veins. Do not end this email with “Best.”

4. Read that book no one asked you to read. It’s not on a single top ten list. It will not give you any talking points at parties. Nothing to flaunt on the subway. You are boring and it doesn’t matter.

5. Find the CD-R of your self-doubting inner monologue. It plays on loop in a lockbox in a closet in your head. It was recorded in the early aughts, when you were in eighth grade and starting to write your own insecurities. You can hear its prosody like a fetus hears everything its mother says, but consonantless. Find it, and — after listening to everything you’ve been listening and not-listening to for the past decade — pause that shit.

6. Run. Literally or whatever. Just don’t think. Imagine scooping out your frontal lobe and emptying it into a trash can. Roll your eyes back and go. You can think when you’re dead.

7. Open that project you started three years ago — the one you kept telling yourself you’d finish but you never did — and break it. Tear it apart, start over in the middle, trash all the good parts and only keep what’s embarrassingly bad. Try to do your worst.

8. Block that person you should’ve blocked a long time ago. Unfollow anyone who makes you feel polite. It. Doesn’t. Matter. None of it. Let their texts slide from your shoulders and onto the floor like light blue rain.

9. Take off your sunglasses.

10. Call your mom. Let her tell you about her vegetable garden. Let her tell you she loves you.

11. Send a thank-you note to the high school teacher you always did your homework for. The one who worked nights to quietly change the course of your life, and you didn’t know it, and they didn’t know it. Be sentimental. If you’re still thinking of them now, ten years later, you’ve earned the right to all the cheese you want.

12. Think of what scared you before you were ten. The claws of dust mites, your parents’ divorce, live burial. You’d stare at the wall next to your bed, tracing all those fears on the bumpy plaster. They didn’t come true. Or maybe they did, but you’re still breathing.

13. You are so much. There are bacteria with pill-like bodies in your stomach and they have existed since the beginning of the universe. You are more than you know, than anyone knows, than doctors and lawyers and scientists know, and this is not overwhelming, this is hopeful and good and magical, and you are a lot. Remember this.

14. Know that people will give you the benefit of the doubt. People will forgive you. People will forget you. People will put their earbuds in their ears and listen to the sounds they want to listen to. People will dye their hair whatever color they want to. People will eat the foods they want to eat and move to the cities they want to move to. Just do what you want and remember that no one cares. And that’s a cliché and it doesn’t matter.

Harris Sockel writes at Human Parts on Medium, and he is on Twitter.

Rory Gilmore preaches the truth: “There’s just a lot of things right now in my life that are undecided and that used to scare me but now I kind of like the idea that it’s all kind of wide open.”

And then I cry. Too much realness for me right now. I can’t believe I graduate in a week.