Andrea Gibson: Before I Die, I Want To Be Somebody’s Favorite Hiding Place
I've been seeing a lot of posts on social media honouring the poet Andrea Gibson who passed away yesterday. I wasn’t familiar with Gibson’s poetry before and found myself reading lots of quotes from their work.
One of them made me pause, and I found myself re-reading it several times. I looked it up and found out it was from an old post on Tumblr.
Lately I’ve been thinking about who I want to love, and how I want to love, and why I want to love the way I want to love, and what I need to learn to love that way, and who I need to become to become the kind of love I want to be……and when I break it all down, when I whittle it into a single breath, it essentially comes out like this: Before I die, I want to be somebody’s favorite hiding place, the place they can put everything they know they need to survive, every secret, every solitude, every nervous prayer, and be absolutely certain I will keep it safe. I will keep it safe.
Perhaps the reason I paused when I saw this quote is because I too have recently been thinking love and relationships, and it articulated something that I wasn’t able to figure out before. Maybe I won’t find my happy ever after, but at least I have a better understanding of what finding love and being loved should feel like.
RIP Andrea Gibson (August 13, 1975 - July 14, 2025)