Don’t move to a new city. Don’t start going to a different coffee shop, or a different library, or a different grocery store. Change what everything in each place means to you. The bell peppers, the caramel syrup, that one book in the very last corner of the non-fiction section they used to read. Think about how you wish you’d written more poems in college, asked that one girl out, taken a different stairway that one day after class. Think about the nights you spent over the toilet bowl, the dry-heaving, the empty beer cans on greying snow. Look at everything new. You could have taken a different subway. You could have walked a different way, you could have been a minute earlier to class and someone else would have caught your eye. You could have gone on that date.
But don’t move to a new city. Don’t go to a different coffee shop.
You could have done everything different. And if you had, you’d never have the chance you do now. To get over someone. To start again. To start again in the same place. Where everything can happen, even if you stand still. Even if you stay still.
Stay in the same place but look with different eyes.
“You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that.”
