Alexis Gavrelis

I know the anxiety that comes from the unknown. I know the bartering that goes on: begging the minute hand to move just a little bit slower. I know people will write in their own goodbye scene and it won’t always be the one we pictured.

Think of how good it was, how, in a different universe, that might’ve been it: then let it go. There will be bruises when you finally uncurl your fingers from his bicep. It’s time to let those bruises heal.

To be from a small town is the belief that people still care deeply about one another and long for a community based on history and legend and animals that go “moo” – but it is also the wary reminder that even beloved places grow too small and minds in those places can grow even smaller still.

You became the almost not for lack of moments (because there were plenty of those), but because there were other lives waiting for us to live and we met too close to the start of them.