Ella Peirce

This is what I imagine the cork board in my heart to look like, minus the yarn and push pins.

I think falling back in love may be better than falling first.

Maybe that thought is too nostalgia-driven, but it’s my truth.

To love fully is to attach strings to everything. There is a corkboard in my heart with red yarn and push pins galore, connecting people to songs and books to movies and feelings to fears. A complicated labyrinth of love like the system of veins in my body. Both going to and from my heart, tying bows around my heartstrings, and doubling back. 

They never really leave you.

The yarn might gather dust after I pour my attention into new pastimes, new diversions, engrossed. Yet the second there’s a flash, it’s like I stayed there. For weeks, months, years.

The rest falls into the background, and it’s new, but it’s old. In the sudden, unforeseen resurgence, there’s a warmth unique to falling back in love.

Falling back feels like a coincidence, but then I turn around and call it the opposite: it deceives me into betting it’s destiny. But deception is just a part of life, and my gamble didn’t harm anyone. It’s okay to be wrong.

Falling back makes the spool of yarn unravel. All of the life that I’ve lived between then and now is suddenly littered with connections associations and signs that have led me to this moment. Most of them are fabricated by my hopeless romanticism. Not that this is romantic, necessarily.

The corkboard that I spend every waking moment thinking about and adding to, subconsciously, is now askew, and once this love-stricken, joyful personality wears off, I have to fix it. 

Honestly, I don’t mind fixing it. 

Repositioning each piece, picking up the pins I knock to the ground, mending the gaps in my theories, and replacing the yarn where it has grown thin and threadbare.

It’s another sample of tedium, but tedium has never bothered me: folding laundry, traffic when I have nowhere to be, sitting on curbs.

Falling back is a testament to love; changing and growing and evolving back into a feeling that once took over every waking moment, like pulling into the driveway after a road trip. With new experiences and, still, a calling to go back.

Many times, I’ll be wrong. I’ll be so off, and I’ll dedicate time to something that never truly had potential, but I don’t think I’ll have a lot of regrets.

“Loving someone is never a waste.”

I hope I never run out of yarn. 

I hope the feeling never changes.

I hope to spend all of forever putting the pieces of myself back together, again and again, because I loved something so much that it broke me.

I hope I spend the rest of my life falling in love and then falling out, just to fall in love again.