Everything i know about heartbreak, I learnt from Houston.

"i won't glorify or romanticise

heartbreak,

for me it was a kind of death

and i was forced to keep living"

   - Warsan Shire

You should fall in love in Houston, definitely not forever, but at least once. Houston will enthusiastically and expensively romance you with all its oil money and terrible traffic and never ending roads and suburbs and streets. There are never ending hidden alley ways where you can park at 2 in the morning and awkwardly reach for your lover in between arguments and lies and more lies and kiss already swollen lips until you find the truth in them. But you have to do it right, you have to fall in love with a man who will dance for you in the middle of the street under street lights right in the middle of the city's center and tell you stories of the military and love and soldiers who weren't always soldiers. it's difficult to determine what to do with this much sadness and pain, this city is drenched in it, it will slowly seep into you and the man who dances for you under the stars. the man who has a laughter that sounds like musical notes suspended on oceans that dragged you away from everything that looks like you and wants you.

You should fall in love in Houston with a man who loves the idea of you. Who wants you to shrink for him, to talk less, argue less, be less you, be smaller, fit in his palm. A man who wants you learn his language and paints the tones into your skin every night. Shut up more, listen to him more, you don't always have to have an opinion and you try. you try to be less aggressive, you try the submissive thing, you read proverbs 31 over and over and over again until you can quote the words in your head as you count to 10 and bite your tongue. you become familiar with the way your blood taste on tongues that have been bitten for so long. you wake up one day and find yourself shriveled, and unrecognizable but you love him so you stay and you fast and you beg God and you wonder what you're going to do if he leaves. Begging becomes your way of life, you spend hours in tears begging him to stay. you rationalise why you stay, why you deserve the pain, you think of all the ways he's convinced you that you're not worthy and you believe them and you tried didn't you?

You should fall in love in Houston with a man who doesn't know how to stay. He will leave. that's all he knows how to do. You should spend your time in bed crying. let no one tell you different. crying is exactly what you should be doing. Some days the pain feels like it's never going to end, but you should wake up and walk to your favourite brunch place and sit there alone and read "Winter's Tale", over and over and over again till you know all the nooks and crannies of New York city without ever having been there. You should call him and beg some more, you should write him emails and poems until you've run out of things to say and then one day, stop calling him. stop writing him poems that he'll never get to see. stop writing chapters about him when you're only but one sentence in his book. dance naked in your bathroom more, smile silently to yourself at dirty jokes. you should giggle more often because you like to and he's no longer there to tell you that giggling is for immature young girls. you're immature and young and sad but giggle anyway because you want to and because there's no one here to tell you that you can't. Laugh in the dark at how beautiful and amazing and fucking worthy you are.

You should acknowledge that you probably did some things you shouldn't have in this love story, you should read it over and over again till you recognise those things and try to be better. then fall in love again with a man who thinks you're worthy of his love and do better, be better, be worthy.


love,
leggy