Sounds Like Love

Grief is just a love song in reverse.

How do I forgive my past self for all the futures I didn’t become? I don’t know.

Sometimes the dreams you come with aren’t the dreams you leave with, and sometimes you just don’t leave at all.

Mom was right—grief was a love song in reverse. The notes were still there, but they sounded a little different.

You know you’re in love when they are the first person you want to hear in the morning and the last person before you go to bed.

It didn't feel like falling the way you did when love was quick and exotic. No, it felt like finding a song you hadn't heard in years played on a jukebox in an old music hall.

The things that left never stayed gone for good—not really. The things that mattered always returned. Just maybe not in the way you expected.

We are poetry in motion

Mom once asked how she could forgive her past self for all the futures she didn’t become, and I wasn’t sure I knew that answer then, but I did now. There was nothing to forgive. Because my mom lived in the moment, wide and full and loud, and she danced in the rain and she sang her favorite songs at the top of her lungs, and she was here—in a place regret couldn’t touch.

If you spend your entire life comparing everything to the best thing you ever made, then you aren’t gonna find joy in any of it. You’ll just be unhappy that they aren’t like the original thing, you know?

Old love was like riding a bike, after all. You never quite forgot how it felt.

My grams used to tell me that love is rare. The real kind." Gigi pulled her arm through Mitch's, her face thoughtful and adoring. "It's not given, it's not stolen—love is borrowed, she always said. It's borrowed, and how lucky we are to be afraid of losing it.

I wish you could see yourself the way the rest of us do. The way I do.

You should cry as much as you want. It’s not a bad thing. It never is. Grief is just a love song in reverse.

There were some songs you made special—songs for first dances, songs for funerals, songs for heartbreak and forgetting. And then there were the songs that made you.

We were all made of up memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people. We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.

Love is not yours to own forever, Love is borrowed and love is blue. It’s a gift of time we don’t got, baby, So I’ll steal my moments with you And when I’m gone and buried under All the baggage that we found Remember to lose yourself, baby. ’Cause wherever you go, there you are. Wherever you go, there we are Alive in the sound. —“Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard

Because the dreams we came with weren’t the dreams that we left with,

I can only hear you, bird.” I blushed at the nickname. “Bird?” “Like a songbird. You seem happiest when you’re playing music.

Every song is a love song, Jo

And this was it. What magic felt like. How it moved. How it persisted. How it thrived.

So kiss me in the mornings, And keep me in a song. Love me with conversations That take the whole night long.

I’d rather be ten people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s tenth-favorite thing.

geosmin,” Dad informed, letting go of his hat once the wind calmed, and tapping the ash from his pipe. “It’s a metabolic by-product of bacteria and algae that lives on the surface of water. When hurricanes rotate, they churn the water, killing the algae on the water’s surface. That’s the smell.

And in the place where that itchy, awful panic once rested in my chest, there bloomed something so lovely, I didn’t have the words yet to describe it. But it sounded—still soft, still unsure—like a song.

Love was a bunch of small things that added up to bigger things. Love was feeling valued. And accepted. Just the way you were. It was never feeling too much, or not enough, even though often you were both, becasue Love loved you anyway. Not in spite of it, but because of it.

You know you're in love when they are the first person you want to hear in the morning and the last person before you go to bed

Change can be good—even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time.