Frank O’Hara

I think that’s one of the strangest things about losing someone who is still alive. Nothing disappears all at once. The person leaves first. The habits take longer. The conversations you continue inside your head take even longer. And the future might be the last thing to leave. I don’t only miss you. I miss things that never even happened. Trips we talked about but never took. Summers we never reached. Ordinary Sundays. Getting older. Going to the swimming pool, just the two of us Spending one New Year’s Eve together.

There are still things I want to tell you. Small things, mostly. A plant I finally learned the name of. Something stupid one of my cats did. A sentence I heard on the street that would have made you laugh. A tree somewhere in Berlin carrying fruit, the kind we would have stopped to inspect as if discovering it ourselves. Sometimes something happens and my first thought is still: I have to tell you this. And for one tiny second, you still exist exactly where you used to. Then I remember. There is nowhere to send it anymore.

❤️

île de ré

Confessions to the moon The most intimate thing, for me, is not kissing you, nor holding you. It's talking to you about myself. If I give you my body, I can take it back. But if I give you my thoughts, it's like giving you a piece of my heart. And when you leave, you take with you the deepest part of me — the one I'll never get back.

I wanted you to make me feel safe when I didn’t yet know how to create safety inside myself. I wanted your love to answer questions it could never answer: Am I enough? Am I desirable? Will you choose me? Will you stay? And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether I was choosing myself. The world keeps moving with an almost offensive normality. People go swimming. Trains arrive. cats demand food. Friends send messages. Plants grow new leaves. Summer comes back. I laugh sometimes. And every time I laugh, I discover that my life continued without asking your permission.