Once upon a time, I fell in love with a place. It was warm and safe and records were always crackling in the corner. Golden light would pour in through the windows and spill across the floor, illuminating dust particles as they danced aimlessly through the air. And I would spend whole days lying in puddles of that light with you, whole days in which my body felt as if it were suspended in mid-air. The hours moved slowly, sweetly, gently. The sun crawled across the floor, inch by inch, during which I don’t remember thinking about much else. And when the last of the golden light disappeared, there we would stay as the full moon rose to cast sheets of iridescent silver across my skin. Sweet April rains would begin to fall out of the sky and into the earth, a symphonic serenade that I can still hear today if I close my eyes. But like anything, this place was never mine to hold onto. And so it rotted like summer’s fruit and it dropped to my feet. And there I fell to my knees trying to pick up the pieces, trying to understand the natural process of decay. But all at once, the music stopped and the world went quiet. You can be ready for a lot of things but never that, never the blank quietness that falls upon your life in the wake of loss.

So I spent that summer in silence, floating on my back in the ocean, walking slowly through art galleries, sipping coffee in courtyards. I walked all over the earth, my bare feet kissing the ground in a beautiful dance of resistance to all that weighed me down. The air was still and rotting and all-enveloping. The sun is the furthest away from the earth in July and maybe that is why its light felt so impersonal those days. The kind of light that does not pour over your body and melt into your skin in golden hues but rather spreads thin white brightness onto everything in sight. The sky was impossibly blue from the crack of dawn till the death of day without a single cloud to make things interesting. Just a blue that stretched on for miles and had a way of making you remember every sweet thing you have ever loved and lost. There was sadness in that blue, a slow stinging sadness that always felt just the same. My ears rang for months from the impact, my body still weak from the fall. My vision was blurry, my memory clouded. Grief made a friend out of me. But my bare feet kissed the earth and blistered from the baking asphalt and my body swayed along to the dead beat of another summer.

It has been years since then, but when April blooms I still find myself remembering that spring. And I never quite know if it is the place that I miss or the person I was within it, for she grows more distant every day. I grieve her innocence all the time. It comes to me in the sweetness of the air, in the blue of the sky. It is forever laced in the silver moonlight of May. Memories scatter the grounds, their sharp edges softening like sea glass as I turn them over and over in my hands, the endless passage of time having weathered their severity. So much so that when I visit home and walk past that house, all I ever feel anymore is that a part of me is still within its walls. As if the events of that spring would play out before me like an old film if I were only to look through a window. There would be half-finished paintings still drying on the table and Nora Jones would still be serenading the afternoon, her voice floating upwards into the room in which we laid all day like we were anything more than just teenagers.

So this is to that little room with the big windows and to the golden light that poured through them like honey as the curtain came down on our adolescence. I knew you and I knew the crackling of vinyl on a Saturday afternoon but I knew nothing of what I know now. And maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe we are meant to be forever falling into worlds in which we know no boundaries from the things that can break us. How else do we learn how we are made, if not in the act of putting ourselves back together again. So I am writing to tell you what this world won’t — that heartbreak is beautiful. That even when you cannot bear the brightness of it, I promise a blue sky will never mean to bring you pain. And when the sun relentlessly crawls in through the window and spills herself for you, she won’t mean to remind you of every sweet thing that has since gone away. She only means to bring a soft light to the darkness. And all of those people laughing are laughing simply because it is their turn to laugh and yours to listen. It will be your turn again. And when spring comes, when its silver moonlight falls once more upon your skin, don’t resist remembering the first time you ever saw it do that. For some things you can never let go of. Some things are just too delicate, too real, too human to ever leave you.