Maybe chapels and bookstores have always felt like home, quiet corners where time slows down and I can almost fool myself into thinking I understand what I’m searching for. One ordinary night after class, I decided to pray, to ask for something I couldn’t name, to plead for a prophecy only my brain would recognize. I tell God I don’t want anything material; I’m just a messed-up girl asking for small, foolish things, like an I love you spoken in a sacred moment, or matching Christmas pajamas for two. I begged for mercy, but this time heaven didn’t stay quiet. Your name was whispered, and I was finally still enough to hear it. They told me I’d know it by the touch, because when you know, you know. I held onto that message for a while, letting it settle, until I started seeking your attention for no reason, just sensing the tension, perhaps one-sided. 

So I turned off my phone and let myself feel a few minutes of pleasure, and just before it ended, your nickname slipped out of me. I thought of you, not once, not twice, but maybe three times. How was I supposed to pretend I hadn’t, when I saw you? It felt so strange, like my own body was betraying me.

I don’t want to think about anything now that I’ve thought of you. 

And when you finally noticed me, your touch startled me so much I wanted to run, but who am I to fight the alchemy? 

That chemistry hit me like a Dostoevsky novel.

Life can only be fully lived in vulnerability and when you wreck someone’s plans, the least you can do is stay, sunshine.

So who am I to fight the alchemy?

Because you’re so sweet, a type of masculinity in extinction, my man. Tell me your stories, I want to know everything that makes your soul light up, even if it’s League of Legends. I’ll mark you on a map and wander through every corner that made you who you are. 

Because when Maria falls in love, she murmurs, “It’ll pass, I’m not a teenager anymore.” Yet with you, it feels like high school again, laughter spilling in the courtyard over our classmate’s name, the world fading as we hide from its noise and their wandering eyes. But baby, I know places. scary place

When Taylor got engaged to Travis, I imagined she had closed a chapter, the kind where pain turns into a Grammy. I thought I would stop feeling her lyrics the same way too. I held on to The Tortured Poets Department like someone clinging to the end of an era, believing it would be my photograph: melancholic, nostalgic, in love with what’s already gone. I’ve always found sadness beautiful, a kind of soft light that makes everything more intense. But my chair shifted. Suddenly, the sad songs no longer belonged to me. Now I want her to write about something else, about the kind of love that happens when life isn’t paying attention, about the calm that comes after asking for the check, because that’s the moment you finally left the table, and it means the beam of sleep is in your eyes, and that’s a good thing. 

It took me a while to realize I was falling for you.
Before, I pictured love as a dark wine, a burning red that consumes my thoughts after two a.m. and you don’t even get that joke yet, but nothing good happens after that hour.
But with you, everything settles.
Loving you feels like that pale blue, streaked with white, one of my favorite skies.
The kind Recife only shows when the sun hides for a little while.
A gentle sky.
Almost like the first fragile light of morning or the delicate seconds before the world fades into dusk.