i hated seventh grade geography,
and i still hate memorizing the longitudes
and latitudes of those middle-of-nowhere towns
twenty or twenty-five miles away from major cities,
but ever since i've been on this new conquest,
exploring treks of dusty brown freckles
trailing along the small of your back,
and the way it seems like those green and blue
lines diverge and converge beneath an
infinite trail of small, soft hairs,
i feel like i could get an A in that class.




2 years. 3 months. my goodness, it's been a very, very long time, and it's daunting and strange to think that you were my everything in the most quaint and discreet ways during the most maelstrom years of my formative years. to be very frank and sincere, i'm wholeheartedly glad that you've become vestiges in a realm that i no longer visit and don't find the need to either. i'm happy and grateful that i learned to be genuinely in love with the right intentions and the vexing uncertainty that every teenager should learn how to do-  i learned how to love and not how to stop, and that is what i'll carry with me forever. i've grown because of the distance, because of the one-sidedness, the genuine thrill of getting on and off a ride that didn't have a middle or an end. i got on, and i don't regret it, not even when i shed those futile tears and hated every inch of the state lines that separated us. i learned to appreciate solitude, to thrive as an individual, to reject collective ideas of how i should be or what i should like, and grew to love the life i live.

 i am thankful that i have a loving family, one that constantly embraces my idiosyncrasies and appreciates the being i am even with all of the miscalculations that have been made. i am grateful for my friends who have come to show me different lights and wavelengths, who are completely different and unique from one another, but somehow run in sync with each other.

most importantly, i'm thankful that i met you and once loved you so endearingly and effortlessly that you only remember who i was instead of who i am today. i really question sometimes whether or not you were my first love, but it doesn't really matter, because you are someone i'll constantly carry to remind myself that it's okay to be yourself. thank you for that.

happy thanksgiving, everyone.