Lexi

“You laugh like you have no worries, I love that”

““I need you to walk away.” “No,” she snaps. Hands on her waist, teeth worrying over her bottom lip in that way that makes me want to pull her into me and inhale until her name is the only word I can say. I know this is supposed to be a serious argument, a break up argument, an “I can’t see you again” argument but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because when every nerve ending is precisely tuned to someone you can’t have, the only options are to laugh or to cry and I’ve cried enough for her. So I laugh instead, let my lips split like worn out seams into the kind of grin that hurts more than it helps. ”I need you to let me go babygirl.” I think my voice might be climbing towards hysteria and I’ve damn sure already hit desperate so I let myself move forward. Let myself walk until the tip of her shoe touches the tip of mine and I can see the way her inhale gets caught halfway between her lungs and her mouth. “I know that’s not in your nature, I know it’s not who you are. I know, I know, I know because if there is anything that I know, it is that I am relentlessly curious and you are the most breathtakingly fascinating thing I’ve ever seen.“ I allow myself a breath to enjoy the way her eyes widen, the way she seems to get caught between what she believes and what she feels. Her bottom lip wobbles. I want to bite it. But I don’t want her to cry and her eyes already look like the sink when I forgot to turn the faucet off as a little kid so I take another precarious step forward. Slip the long elegant lines of her fingers between mine. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything, I. I am just not ready.” She shakes her head miserably and the unsteady beat of my steadily breaking heart is uncomfortably heavy in my chest. ”I know you aren’t,” I say quietly, so quietly that even if we weren’t in an empty room, only she could hear. “But you can’t ask me to be your friend while you decide whether you want me like a friend wants another friend or like something else. I can be your friend or I can be more than that, but I can’t be this. Can’t be in this odd in between where you touch me like you want me and tell me that you don’t. Do this for me, ok? Do this for me because I am already halfway in love with you and if you give me even an inch more, I’m gonna slip.””

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”

“Sometimes you tell someone to never call you again and then the phone rings and you hope it’s them. It’s the most twisted logic of all time.”

“The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy engraved with the words ‘you are still alive.’ You are still alive. Act like it.”

“If the one you love, secretly or not, expresses their love for you in the way you do, you will know you are loved in an instant. Secret love will no longer exist. But we live in a world where there are many different ways of loving, and we claim that we are not being loved just because we have no clue of their ways when it comes to love. You are loved no matter how unloveable you think you are, because you have no idea. You have no absolute idea about their ways with love.”

“Dear Karen, If you’re reading this it means I actually worked up the courage to mail it, so good for me. You don’t know me very well but if you get me started I have a tendency to go on and on about how hard the writing is for me. But this, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. There’s no easy way to say this so I’ll just say it, I met someone. It was an accident, I wasn’t looking for it, it wasn’t on the make, it was a perfect storm. She said one thing, I said another, next thing I knew, I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the middle of that conversation. Now there’s this feeling in my gut she might be the one. She’s completely nuts in a way that makes me smile, highly neurotic with a great deal of maintenance required, she is you, Karen. That’s the good news. The bad is I don’t know how to be with you right now. And that scares the shit out of me. Because if I’m not with you right now, I have this feeling that we’ll get lost out there. It’s a big, bad world full of twists and turns. And people have a way of blinking and missing the moment. The moment that could have changed everything. I don’t know what’s going on with us, and I can’t tell you why you should waste the leap of faith on the likes of me, but damn you smell good. Like home. And you make excellent coffee. That’s got to count for something right? Call me. Unfaithfully yours, Hank Moody.”