Playing house

our story is much of two children playing house in one of our backyards.

Two kids innocently pretending that we know exactly what we are doing, mimicking what we think we've learned about being together and love. We are never as serious as it actually is, but to us, this is as real as it gets in this plastic house we play home in.

Play, that's the keyword. We always wanted to play not be the real thing. Yet we wanted the real thing but never knew what it would look like all grown-up and outside of these plastic walls.

Playing house is the kid version of saying "I see a future with you" so we toy with the idea run into the backyard each day at playtime and we pretend like we know what love is. I yell at you over something dumb you did and you go bring me flowers from the garden and suddenly I am swooned by just how great your love is.

we forget that flowers are not inner work, flowers are merely representative of what could bloom if we focused more on the triggers and how to keep the safety on rather than the dead body on the floor after we've already unloaded the gun.

we have a love where two pennies and a dime can buy groceries,

where two pennies and a dime can buy a lifetime supply of happiness, as long as we are together we will always be enough.

we forget we have to go home at the end of the day and grow up before we understand that apart we are enough and together we will be more.

I ask myself how hard is it to let go of something that hurt anyways? but you were never a splinter in my finger or a cut that made me bleed you were the stitching that held me together after the deep cut.

yet at times you were the deep cut as well as the stitching.

at times I was nothing more but a deep cut and the blood on both our hands.

growing up is realizing our love will look either identical or complete opposite of what we saw our parents be.

Growing up is identifying with hawks and their dating status. They pick a lifetime partner yet are barely together; constantly in a long-distance relationship with the knowledge, not the hope that we will return to each other.

growing up is wanting to upgrade out of that plastic house into four walls where you can breathe.

growing up is realizing you don't want to play house you want to create the greatest love story of all time, slowly, yet just paced divinely enough that we might be able to call it perfect, but we don't want perfect either way.

growing up is saying we are done recreating movies and are going to start making them instead.

growing up is realizing that love doesn't always look like what we think love is, sometimes its being sad, angry, and apologetic, other times it looks like flowers, compassion and connection.

growing up is realizing that love looks like a lot of things that playing house didn't teach us.

growing up is coming back to that same plastic house hoping to see you standing there too saying I still see a future with you, in a non-plastic way.