Kendra Syrdal

You’ll never look at a pickle jar the same way again.

Do you think love is something you can’t control, or something you choose to do?

I was convinced if I threw it all away, shoved it in leftover grocery bags and left it on your porch that I would be free. That I would be clean. But I wasn’t.

And the Oscar goes to…

“Does my hair smell like nothing or does it smell like I haven’t washed it all week? Will dry shampoo take care of it? Why has no beauty vlogger tackled this debacle?”

Wine will never stress you out. It’s good for your heart, it gets you to calm down, it’s really there for you and only you. Aka: the best partner EVER.

But the thing about moving on, the things about getting over people is there is no one-size-fits-all way to do it. There is no recipe, no formula, no magical way that you can wake up one morning and stop caring.

I will push you further away than you already are because if one of us starts to close the gap, starts to lessen the milage on either the markers on the side of the highway or the proverbial distance I intentionally put between us, I won’t know what to do.

I want her gender, her identity, to only be one part of her. And I never want her to grow up thinking of it as something limiting or something that defines who she is “supposed to be.”

There will still be days when you’ll see someone else, and you’ll wish you were them. There will be days where you’ll look at someone else’s wins, and only be able to see your losses.

They would do anything for love. Even kill.

“I have to keep them around because I’ll never find anyone else.”

Making your younger sibling drive you around when you’re home for the holidays, because cars are scary and you forgot how to be a person.

Life may be plastic, but it’s not always fantastic.

I compartmentalized every last piece of loving you and wanting you and needing you until I was absolutely sure I didn’t. I bit down and suppressed every piece of missing you until I could believably say that I didn’t care.

“Roses are red
Violets are blue
Your best-friend tried to fuck me
And I said no because of you.”

Realize that the only person responsible for your own confidence, and your own self-love, is you.

I try to have easy love, boring love. The kind of love that isn’t written about in poetry, or on walls that witness fighting, or that lingers in scars that cover my heart. I try to have the kind of love that comes from comfort, comes from quiet.