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Grief is just a love song in reverse.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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How do I forgive my past self for all the futures I didn’t become? I don’t know.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Sometimes the dreams you come with aren’t the dreams you leave with, and sometimes you just don’t leave at all.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Mom was right—grief was a love song in reverse. The notes were still there, but they sounded a little different.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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You know you’re in love when they are the first person you want to hear in the morning and the last person before you go to bed.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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It didn't feel like falling the way you did when love was quick and exotic. No, it felt like finding a song you hadn't heard in years played on a jukebox in an old music hall.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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The things that left never stayed gone for good—not really. The things that mattered always returned. Just maybe not in the way you expected.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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We are poetry in motion
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Old love was like riding a bike, after all. You never quite forgot how it felt.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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If you spend your entire life comparing everything to the best thing you ever made, then you aren’t gonna find joy in any of it. You’ll just be unhappy that they aren’t like the original thing, you know?
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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There were some songs you made special—songs for first dances, songs for funerals, songs for heartbreak and forgetting. And then there were the songs that made you.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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I wish you could see yourself the way the rest of us do. The way I do.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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My grams used to tell me that love is rare. The real kind." Gigi pulled her arm through Mitch's, her face thoughtful and adoring. "It's not given, it's not stolen—love is borrowed, she always said. It's borrowed, and how lucky we are to be afraid of losing it.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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You should cry as much as you want. It’s not a bad thing. It never is. Grief is just a love song in reverse.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Because the dreams we came with weren’t the dreams that we left with,
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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And the summer hummed on, humid and clear, without a cloud in the sky, and the fireflies lit on the edges of too-tall blades of grass, and so, so quietly, the wind that sighed through the trees sounded like the turn of a page.
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Ashley Poston (A Novel Love Story)
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We were all made of up memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people. We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Mom once asked how she could forgive her past self for all the futures she didn’t become, and I wasn’t sure I knew that answer then, but I did now. There was nothing to forgive. Because my mom lived in the moment, wide and full and loud, and she danced in the rain and she sang her favorite songs at the top of her lungs, and she was here—in a place regret couldn’t touch.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.
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Ashley Poston (The Dead Romantics)
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And this was it. What magic felt like. How it moved. How it persisted. How it thrived.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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So kiss me in the mornings,
And keep me in a song.
Love me with conversations
That take the whole night long.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Every song is a love song, Jo
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Love is not yours to own forever, Love is borrowed and love is blue. It’s a gift of time we don’t got, baby, So I’ll steal my moments with you And when I’m gone and buried under All the baggage that we found Remember to lose yourself, baby. ’Cause wherever you go, there you are. Wherever you go, there we are Alive in the sound. —“Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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It was a short walk from the bridge to the waterfall, and I heard it long before I actually saw it, a loud, roaring sound that reverberated like rolling thunder. We passed under an outcropping of rock, and then there it was on the other side.
Quixotic Falls.
It took my breath away.
The waterfall was so tall, I had to crane my neck to see the top of it. Shimmers of a rainbow reflected in the mist and sunlight, and the air was cool and damp. It felt good in the humidity of the afternoon. I closed my eyes, and enjoyed the mist that clung to my skin, coagulating into droplets. We walked along the underside of it, and the sunlight hit the falling water like it was glimmers of glass. The tunnel between the rock face and the waterfall was smooth and rounded from thousands of years of erosion. Vines crawled across the rocks--- morning glories and four o'clocks and honeysuckles. The waterfall poured down into a small watering hole that then slowly wormed its way into a larger river down the mountain. I knew this place would feel whimsical. Surrounding the swimming hole, the bright pink heather and stark white yarrow mixed with coneflowers and black-eyed Susans.
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Ashley Poston (A Novel Love Story)
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In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of the house, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder. “There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.
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Ashley Poston (The Dead Romantics)
Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Change can be good—even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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You know you're in love when they are the first person you want to hear in the morning and the last person before you go to bed
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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Love was a bunch of small things that added up to bigger things. Love was feeling valued. And accepted. Just the way you were. It was never feeling too much, or not enough, even though often you were both, becasue Love loved you anyway. Not in spite of it, but because of it.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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And in the place where that itchy, awful panic once rested in my chest, there bloomed something so lovely, I didn’t have the words yet to describe it. But it sounded—still soft, still unsure—like a song.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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I can only hear you, bird.” I blushed at the nickname. “Bird?” “Like a songbird. You seem happiest when you’re playing music.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)
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geosmin,” Dad informed, letting go of his hat once the wind calmed, and tapping the ash from his pipe. “It’s a metabolic by-product of bacteria and algae that lives on the surface of water. When hurricanes rotate, they churn the water, killing the algae on the water’s surface. That’s the smell.
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Ashley Poston (Sounds Like Love)