Somewhere In Between

A sample of Somewhere In Between

somewhere in between

Kelly Peacock

Thought Catalog Books — thoughtcatalog.com — New York • Los Angeles

Copyright © 2022 Kelly Peacock.

All rights reserved.

Published by Thought Catalog Books, an imprint of the digital magazine Thought Catalog, which is owned and operated by The Thought & Expression Company LLC, an independent media organization based in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California.

This book was produced by Chris Lavergne and Noelle Beams with art direction and design by KJ Parish. Special thanks to Bianca Sparacino for creative editorial direction and Isidoros Karamitopoulos for circulation management.

Visit us at thoughtcatalog.com and shopcatalog.com.

Made in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-1-949759-47-1

This is for the ones who are somewhere in
between their heartache and healing.

how easy it was for us
to avoid it, the heat
between us.

how often I think of us,
the way I looked at him
and the way he looked at me,
just the same.

the heat between us

There’s something about the summertime and the blue skies above a gray city that reminds me of the days we spent at coffee shops in our shorts and tees, accidentally kicking each other’s shins under the table, looking at each other for a moment too long.

How easy it was for us to avoid it, the heat between us. How often I think of us, the way I looked at him and the way he looked at me, just the same.

midsommar

You let the mosquitoes get close and eat you alive
simply because you want to feel something
other than what you’ve been feeling:
the ache of a love affair that never really was,
the slow burn of watching twin flames disintegrate,
the death of two people who ended up together
because the universe made it so.
You grieve the love like a loss,
as if you have no other choice,
as if two people who were together in another life
weren’t together in this one
because that’s just the way things go sometimes.
There’s something about the humidity,
how it reminds you of his palms and
how they felt touching yours.
There’s a softness to the way the
moths flutter around the light.
If someone were to ask,
Did he feel like home to you?
you might let the quiet do the talking.

I want to say something
about the bridge I’m getting over,
the tragic love affair we endured.
Maybe it was partially my fault:
all the thinking and loving and longing I did.
I sat with the hurt as if I had no other choice.
I ignored the inevitable, the obvious.
I put my faith in someone too weak to
hold my heart in their hands.

I want to hear you say that you think of me.
Even if it’s a lie,
even if nothing comes from it.
All I want is to know that I mattered to you
more than you made me think I did.

to love

I want him to find it easy to love me
but I’m afraid
I might not be easy to love after all.

notice the sunlight

He tells you he loves you but not in that way
and it feels like the sound of glass shattering.
You will want to piece it together
even though it hurts
but it doesn’t matter—at least it’s together.
Memorize his body and leave the rest be.
Notice the sunlight, the cracked glass.

You’re the kind of person who loves hard, aren’t you?

You crave love so deeply, so furiously.

You give so much of yourself to others and sometimes you neglect your own needs.

If that is your truth, so be it. But please, don’t let yourself fall for the bad ones. The ones who convince you that you are anything less than significant. Don’t let yourself get attached to the ones who only want to pull away. The ones with a heart that does not match your capacity to love. The ones who—you won’t admit—you make excuses for.

These people are not distant because they’re afraid of getting hurt, they’re distant from a lack of trying. They don’t fear attachment because they fear they could lose you, but because they are uncomfortable with someone seeing them for who they are, deep down.

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