It’s one of the last days of warmth — I can feel it — before the cold is here to stay. When I head out for a run the air smells more like early spring than impending winter. If it weren’t for all the leaf blowers I might have believed it.
I’m listening to Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, & Royal Blue — my second time reading, first time with the audiobook — and it has me feeling teary all day. Love stories, the really really fucking good ones at least (and this is one of those), still do that for me. I’m not the same college freshman who would get lost reading posts on “Love Gives Me Hope” that led me to sob in front of my roommate at strangers’ three-sentence love stories, but I am not not that same girl either. If that makes any sense.
There’s a quote I’ve written about on here before that I dredged up again this morning from Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle Series: “Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn’t all-encompassing, that wasn’t blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she’d had this kind, she didn’t want the other.”
The words felt like air, alive and true in this present moment fresh after a week with my friends. But then also, completely nostalgic, far away, something you have in lofted beds and in communal bathrooms and in being twenty and not knowing any better and every moment after is just a battle to stay in that magic you took for granted. You win the battles, you find the magic again, but you need to do both on purpose.
When I got home this weekend, after a week and a half away, how wide my windows were surprised me. A whole wall of them looking out and there, with the trees bare for the season, I can see the gray lake better than ever before. When you first turn onto Horseshoe Bay Road from the top of the hill the view opens up and it takes your breath, every time. I felt it this time, too, home. When I stepped out of the car I was reminded of what I’ve known for a long time: there is something about the air here. Clean and good for the heart.
I came here to plant myself. I made this move because it was starting to feel that my entire life was stalled because I was not even at the starting line anymore. Like the race I had run was done and I was just lapping in circles hoping the course would change on its own. I’m at the starting line now. I’m ready to be planted now. It takes time and I at once feel like I have buckets and years of it and also like it’s slipping through my fingers while I hesitate and call it patience.
There are many pearls in Red, White, & Royal Blue — here’s one:
“When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.”
I think a lot about intention and accountability and, when I can’t help it, I think about them when I have been in love. The romantic, good, soul-encompassing kind that my past selves have worshipped — the kind I wonder if it was real, know it was, and hope in the deepest part of my heart that I will be proven wrong. That there is something more true and beautiful than my love stories already lived.
My brain is flickering, trying not to short-out after being fried last week. An emotional barrage with four years of build-up. I haven’t quite recovered yet so when I hear, “History, huh?” I cry.
With Love,
Natalie