eulogy 4
I. ON MEN WHO GLOW LIKE LANTERNS
Some men arrive the way Gatsby's parties begin - all glitter, all promise, the room gold-dusted with possibility.
They'll say your name like a prophecy, touch like a revelation, and still choose the soft gravity of another life when the sun rises.
Know this: you are not wrong for believing in the green light. Just don't drown for anyone who won't swim.
II. ON LEAVING AND BEING LEFT
There will be a man who walks back to his wife the way Daisy walked back to Tom - quiet, fragile, apologetic only to himself.
He'll tell you Christ called him home as if God Himself asked him to break your heart gently.
When this happens, remember faith isn't an exit door for men afraid to face their own reflection.
III. ON AGE AND WANTING THINGS EARLY
Stories like Lolita are not love stories, but they will teach you something: older men do not make you older.
Their attention does not crown you. If you seek healing in their arms, let it be healing you one day walk away from with your power intact. Let intimacy be medicine, not mythology.
IV. ON GRIEF AND GIRLHOOD
You will lose people. You will lose versions of yourself, too. And somewhere between heartbreak and the poems you write at 1am, you'll realize your grief is an artist. Let her paint. Let her make masterpieces out of the parts of you they couldn't carry.
V. ON DESIRE AND SOFT-BODY COURAGE
There will be men who speak to you like sin, who press their hunger into your neck, who tell you they'd ruin you in doorways. Respond only if your soul answers back. Desire is holy when you choose it with open eyes.
VII. ON PERSPECTIVE (EARNED THE HARD WAY)
Time is a stern but gentle teacher. She doesn't give back what you lost - she gives you new eyes to understand why it had to leave.
VIII. ON LOVE'S FINAL TRUTH
Write this on the margins of your life: You are not a supporting character in the story of any man who touches you. You are the whole book. The glossary. The epilogue they'll remember years later when they swear, they forgot your name.
IX. ON BECOMING THE POET YOUNGER GIRLS WRITE FOR
One day a girl will send you a poem and say you inspired me. And you'll realize your survival turned into language without your permission. This is the quiet magic of healing: your scars become signposts for people who haven't found their way yet. Treat this responsibility gently - but don't shy from it. It means your heart is doing holy work.
X. ON LOVING LIKE A SIREN, NOT A MARTYR
Your desire is not a sin. Your longing is not a flaw. You are allowed to be celestial and carnal in the same breath. Be the siren who sings out of freedom, not desperation. Let men come to you because you call them, not because you drown by trying to reach them.
XI. ON TRUTH, EVEN WHEN IT CUTS
Your life will have chapters you're hesitant to speak aloud - the men you shouldn't have loved, the nights you shouldn't have stayed, the choices you learned from only because they broke you first. Write them anyway. Your truth is a lantern. You don't owe anyone darkness.
XII. ON THE MERCY OF TIME
Time does not restore what you lost - it restores you. Piece by piece, hour by hour, until the shape of your life no longer resembles the wreckage you crawled out of. Let time take her time. She is slower than heartbreak, but kinder.
XIII. CLOSING
If anyone ever asks what you've learned from all of this - for me, it may be Jonathan and Dwight, and from the men who touched your skin and the ones who touched your soul - tell them this.
You became a woman who does not dim herself for love, for grief, or for the comfort of others.
A woman who can speak of wounds without reopening them. A woman whose heart has learned to bend without breaking. A woman who writes so others can breathe.
And if you must choose between the dream and the woman you are becoming, always choose the woman - because she is the true legacy. Self-abandonment is the only tragedy. The rest is just weather.
Collected wisdom from a life that felt like literature, arranged like constellations and cautionary tales.
Chloe