We might make ourselves over and over again into songs.

We used to sit in front of the hearth, strumming our guitars and humming our tunes and pulling words out of thin air that rhymed and sounded beautiful against the crackle of the fire. We wrote of heartbreak and love and that feeling you get when you can’t breathe without the one person you can’t breathe with. We wrote what we knew for as long as we could. Then we started to work. We molded ourselves into the people we’d heard others sing about and pretended we felt their pain. I became a girl who’d smelled an unfamiliar perfume on her boy’s shirt. You became the boy. We made ourselves new, over and over again, in the space between the harmonies and the flames.