Track 4: “If Only You Knew”

• IDEA: I actually can’t remember. Idk if this was another one of my Escapril writings, or if this was just all me after I'd read an Emily Henry book or something and felt more caught up in the romantic notes of life than usual (bc I do remember that I was still very much so in lovey-dovey mode). 

I was trying to… find the right words to show what a heart looked like after it’d been lying dormant for so long—the love inside of it gone unused. I wanted to write what happens when a person dares to open themselves up again to the risk of what it is to fall in love—not be pushed into love, not an accidental stumble into it, but a purposeful trust fall. 

My wheels just kept spinning and spinning to think of what thing, what object, I could use to properly convey that feeling. Then it came to me: an abandoned house. I loved the idea of an abandoned house. Somewhere that was once lived-in, loved, filled to the brim with warm memories, littered with pictures of forgotten moments captured in time. A house, that was once a home, now a house again…  Dilapidated, visibly falling apart, a house that most around probably now dismiss as little more than town fodder… all except one, that is. I kept thinking it over for a minute or two, but obviously once I landed on “house,” it stuck.

• WRITING PROCESS: Domino… but make it ✨backwards ✨. 

“The very thought of you staggers me. 

My heart is a home because of you.”

If memory serves me correctly, I think those lines stood as a poem on their own first. And then, I don’t know… I got one of those instinctive nudges that it didn’t belong alone as soon as I’d written it down. That it didn’t belong by itself; I just didn’t have the other words to pair it with yet. So I let it be for a while.

A few weeks later, after I’d settled on the abandoned house idea for the poem I was currently writing, I remembered that poem—sitting pretty and undisturbed in one of my poetry documents on my laptop. So I revisited. And when I started writing “If Only You Knew,” the first thing I did was stick that poem, those two lines, at the very end. 

This instance is just one prime example as to why I hate trying to explain a “process” to the way I write and make certain creative decisions 😂 because there’s really never a formal process whenever I’m creating; I just move. If ‘the muses’ say go right, I go right. Go left, I go left. This time, they told me to put those words at the end when I didn’t even have a beginning yet, so I did it. And whenever I did, the dominos fell 🤷🏽‍♀️. 

• As a matter of fact, they fell quite a lot: “If Only You Knew” ended up with like eight different versions 😂 nine maybe? And I loved every single one! But obviously I couldn’t put eight versions of the same poem in one book, so I picked the one that felt like it belonged. The one that nudged me juuuuust a little more 🤏🏽.  That’s the one you got.

• MY FAVORITE LINES: 

• “The rooms were hollow in spirit 

and mourned for what they once carried in their corners.” 

I feel like this line is very overlooked and underrated and deserves the same love that certain lines in “Puzzles” and “The Graveyard” get lol. 

• “The very thought of you staggers me. 

My heart is a home because of you.”

gahhhhh, this one just makes my heart warm and fuzzy 🥹💞

• AFTERMATH: Relieveddddd. I finally had—I believe, at least—an accurate depiction for what an assumed “jaded” heart looked like. 

  
  

I’d wanted to capture of the entire journey of the house—

house ➡️ home ➡️ house ➡️ 💖home💖

and not just get one half or the other of the house’s story, because I don’t know… I feel like we do that with hearts a lot? Get one part of a heart’s story and run with it, and that’s the narrative we stick with. So I wanted to make sure I’d made it known to the reader that there was more to the house’s story, before it’d become an object that was so easily dismissed. My way of saying it’s worth it to read it all.  Don’t place a bookmark in the pages of a heart, sit it on your nightstand to collect dust, and act as if you’ve read the whole thing. Read everything. 

Track 4 is complete 🎬. Only one left for IASwaPg! And then (dear God lol) we move onto BTS: Vol. I 🤍.

See you next week for 'Purple Guitar's' finale ✨. 

xoxo 💋

IG: @joyyy_reads ✨

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excerpt from a poem you’ll see again in the future (🤭)—“Her Name Was Jessie:”

Breathing was only bearable when it was blurry;

there was nothing worse than a day she could remember.

If living was truly fire, her life was embers.

Or maybe it would be more fitting to call it an existence,

because the sins were never kind to their mistress.