Category: “the playlist”

We became experts at surviving one more night.

And strangers to tomorrow.

Somewhere between the first song and the last one, we created a language that belonged only to us.

A song sent at an impossible hour.

A lyric that said what neither of us knew how to say.

A quiet moment outside when the rest of the world felt too loud.

We didn’t always know how to talk to each other.

But somehow, we always knew what song to send.

For a while, we kept finding each other after dark.

When the day was over.

When everything else stopped demanding answers.

When we didn’t have to explain what we were.

We were just two people sitting in the quiet, pretending morning wasn’t coming.

I spent fifteen years teaching my heart not to open.

Then, in a month, you reminded me it still could.

I still don’t know if that was a miracle or a wound.

Maybe it was both.

You called it a fire.

I called it a door opening.

Maybe we were both just describing the same light.

There were moments where I forgot how long I had been alone.

Moments where I started imagining things I had stopped allowing myself to imagine.

A future.

A family.

A version of myself I thought I had missed my chance to become.

Maybe that is why losing it felt bigger than losing a person.

I wasn’t just losing someone.

I was losing the version of myself that existed when I believed I had finally been found.

The songs are still here.

The playlist is still here.

The memories are still here.

You left behind songs I can never hear the same way again.

This is not the story of two people who didn’t care.

It is the story of two people who cared so much that eventually every wound became a weapon.

Two wounded people found a place where they could breathe for a moment.

We mistook that breath for a home.

And then we had to survive losing it.

Because maybe the saddest things aren’t the things that weren’t real.

Maybe they are the things that were real…

but couldn’t stay.

the playlist begins.

I found a strand of your hair on my shoulder today.

Not a photograph.
Not a message.
Not a song.

Just something small that somehow carried the weight of everything.

It made me realize how strange it is that a person can leave, but the evidence that they were here stays behind.

For a moment, I wasn’t thinking about what happened.

I wasn’t thinking about the ending.

I was just thinking:

you were here.

We built a universe after midnight, but morning always came to collect it.

I spent so much time wondering what you needed me to be.

A safe place.

A steady hand.

Someone who listened when the world got too loud.

Someone who stayed.

Maybe somewhere along the way, I forgot something.

Not how to answer.

Not how to fix.

Not how to fight every battle before it came.

How to listen.

Actually listen.

To sit beside someone and hear the parts of them they thought nobody noticed.

I spent years thinking that part of me was gone.

The part that wanted to protect something.

The part that wanted to build something.

The part that wanted to be more than just someone surviving another day.

Then suddenly it was there again.

Like it had been waiting.

I wanted to be someone worth calling when you needed peace.

Someone worth finding after midnight.

Someone you trusted standing beside you when life became heavy.

Not because you were weak.

Because everyone deserves somewhere they can finally put the weight down.

Maybe that was the part I didn’t understand at first.

I thought I was discovering how much I cared about you.

But I was also discovering how much of myself I had buried.

The patience.

The softness.

The desire to come home to something.

The feeling of wanting someone else’s happiness to matter alongside my own.

Maybe the hardest part wasn’t losing what I gave.

Maybe it was remembering how much I still had left to give.

For a little while, I got to be that place.

For a little while, I walked with purple hearts on me.

I think we both saw something in each other that we wanted to protect.

i spent so much of my time trying to build the perfect night.

the perfect words.
the perfect moment.
the perfect version of myself.

but maybe that was the mistake.

maybe the best memories aren’t built.

maybe they just happen.

two people.
one spark.
one moment where the rest of the world gets quiet.

i think that’s why certain songs stay with us.

not because of the words.

because they become bookmarks.

a timestamp from a version of ourselves we can never meet again.

and maybe the cruelest part about a fire isn’t that it ends.

all fires do.

it’s knowing that, for a moment…

it really did burn.

and maybe that was the real gift.

not the ending.

not the awakening.

so i’m going to turn the music back up.

i’m going to dance badly when nobody’s watching.

i’m going to laugh.

i’m going to create.

i’m going to be ridiculous.

i’m going to be me.

some people will understand it.

some people will laugh at it.

that’s fine.

i’m just doing my thing.

and right now?

i’m burnin’ it down.

“before we burned each other, we kept each other warm.”

Some people enter your life quietly.

Others arrive like they were always supposed to find you.

She called me her bestie.

A word so small it almost sounds silly now, but back then it meant something. It meant there was a space in someone’s day where I existed.

A message.

A cigarette.

A walk.

A random thought she wanted to share.

After years of silence, sometimes the smallest things feel the loudest.

I don’t think she understood what she gave back to me.

I don’t think I did either.

Not at first.

I spent fifteen years convincing myself there were parts of life that were no longer meant for me.

Love.

A family.

Someone reaching for me when they didn’t have to.

Someone wanting me there.

Then, somehow, in the middle of two complicated lives, we found this little place where the rest of the world got quiet.

The phone calls weren’t just phone calls.

They were little windows into a life I thought I missed my chance at.

Hearing her laugh.

Hearing her with her kids.

Walking around with headphones on, talking about nothing until nothing somehow became everything.

I felt like a fly on the wall of a world I always wanted to belong to.

And maybe that is why it hit so hard.

Because I wasn’t just falling for her.

I was meeting a version of myself I thought disappeared.

She told me:

“you honestly lit a fire in me that’s been out for sometime.”

I never forgot that.

Because she lit one in me too.

For a little while, two people who were tired remembered what it felt like to be alive.

Maybe we didn’t know how to carry it.

Maybe we were holding something neither one of us was ready for.

But I won’t rewrite history just because the ending hurt.

Before the fire burned,

it kept us warm.

Before it hurt, it healed something.