6.21.22 Summer Bella Style

It’s Summer Bella style! Check out the newest issue of Bella Grace’s Bookzine Issue #32! I have two pieces in this delicious introduction to summer, “The Girl Who Steals Time,” about making every moment count, and “Magic After Midnight,” for all of us who find that night is the keeper of our most productive and bewitching moments. Below, I’ve shared a quote from each! I hope you will check into both and let me know your thoughts. YOUR words, thoughts, and wonderings mean more to me than you could ever know. They keep me writing. Please enjoy the sneak peek.

All my love,

Elle

“The Girl Who Steals Time”

• “I’m willing to bet I’m not the only three-to-eight-minute girl out there struggling to squeeze time out to the continuum just to have another moment to treasure. Time is a relative foe. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the seconds I’ve stretched, and when I ask myself if I regret any of them, I find that I just don’t.”

“Magic After Midnight”

• “Being in the space between sleep and awake and dreaming forces you to think in a place that is still. It is a moment given patiently by the night, one where day wouldn’t give the same allowance. In the dozy twilight hours that don’t exist for most, your imagination is invited to play. When you find yourself awake without meaning to be, unintentionally lucid, use it!”

6.12.22 Forty-Five Years

For you mom and dad. Thank you for teaching me again and again what love is. I am eighteen years in today … you are forty-five. I will keep studying your beautiful example. Here is what I’ve learned so far …

I’ve heard of love described as chemistry

but chemical reactions do not tend to strengthen over time

I’ve heard of love described as biology

but if it were, then it would be marked by an innate sense of self-preservation, not self-sacrifice

I’ve heard of love described as psychology

but human connection is not mutually exclusive to just one other

So …

I suggest love is built on something far more than powerful than science –

it is built on a promise –

to keep trying, when trying seems impossible (as it will)

to keep hoping, when hope feels too far away (as it is)

to keep dreaming, when dreams have broken (as they do)

Love is built on yes

and yes again

and yes a thousand times more

Love it built on time

time moving too fast

and too slow

and perfect moments where it stops all together

Love is built on someday

and countless yesterdays

and I’m here right nows

Love

does

not

make

sense

Yet here we are …

and so the only logical conclusion is that love is not a science,

it is a magic entirely its own

cast and crafted

blessed and bound

As old as Earth herself

As young as the echo of a heartbeat

Love IS …

what other explanation need there be?