new chances and memories?

for what is an ending, really,

if not a brand-new

beginning?

i like to think that

we all die several times

over the course of our lives

before we die in the

physical, funereal, buried

kind of way.

personally,

i have watched

myself die time and time again.

the ballerina me died at 9

when i told my mom i wanted to quit.

the athletic me died at 12

when i walked off the soccer field

for the last time.

the naive, romantic me died at 16

at the hands of someone who

should have known better.

and i grieve, some days.

i mourn the lost versions

of myself because they

were beautiful,

and a lot of them deserved better.

and while some of those deaths

were through no fault of mine,

many of them were.

most of them, in fact.

i cast them off to crumble to dust

with a simple choice,

a mindless decision.

and i don’t regret it,

even as i allow myself

to feel sad about it.

because if one of those

versions had lived,

if i had made the choices

that would have kept it alive,

then the me i am now

would not exist.

the countless variations

of myself fading away

with every yes or no,

every left or right,

were worth it to get here.

to get to the best version

i can be.

i don’t know who i am if i am not grieving something, which is to say i don’t know who i am now that i am no longer grieving him. for so long, i have been mourning the death of us, long past the end of the funeral. each year, i’d find a new way to dig up his grave until one day i found there was nothing left to unearth. where there once was a corpse, there were flowers blooming in its place. what once was a grave was now a garden. and i think that represents how i grew after him, how i became something beautiful in the aftermath of something so ugly. some days i still don’t recognize myself without his shadow in my eyes, but i am learning to. some days i miss having a gravestone to visit, but i am learning that having a garden is so much better.

—stormy gray

i never told you this,

but i’m not sorry i left.

i’m just sorry that i had to.

so time goes on

and i fall in love

with somebody new,

and maybe you fall in love

with somebody new too,

but either way,

you delete our photos,

and i don’t ask you to meet

up for coffee, because

you don’t want

to see me anymore,

and i broke the promise

i made to you, i know,

but i couldn’t have predicted

the person i’d become once

we broke up any more than

you could have, and we swore

to always be friends, but

look at us now:

more distant, more like strangers