I don’t like it when you use my shampoo, because then your hair smells like me, not you.

Most people, I've noticed, are instinctively harsh to strangers. They expect every approach to be an attack, every question to be an interruption.

exemplar, n. It's always something we have to negotiate- the face that my parents are happy, and yours have never been. I have something to live up to, and if I fail, I still have a family to welcome me home. You have a storyline to rewrite, and a lack of faith that it can ever be done. You love my parents, I know. But you never get too close. You never truly believe there aren't bad secrets underneath.

Its a fine line between love and stalking.

And still, for all the jealously, all the doubt, sometimes I will be struck with a kind of awe that we're together. That someone like me could find someone like you --- it renders me wordless. Because surely words would conspire against such luck, would protest the unlikelihood of such a turn of events.

Belonging. Togetherness. These words are as complicated and confusing as the word love. It’s probably all the same thing. Or it would be if we let it be. I can only guess from observation.

seven wonders of the world and I have to ask for an eighth fill a bottle with some prayers and spend them on hope create an easy route just so I can complicate send my heart down that slippery slope