It’s June, and I’m thinking of you.

Not all the time anymore, but in echoes. Haunting.

Last summer, on Hinge, you told me I was haunting you. The strange thing is that last June, I was being haunted by someone else.

I remember smiling. Because I had spent so long trying to escape someone else's ghost that the idea of becoming one myself felt almost romantic. I think I texted you after.

But what I didn't know hauntings have a way of changing addresses.

Because it’s June again, and now this time, you’re haunting me.

You arrive the way summer does: gradually, until suddenly everything is warm enough to remind me of what I no longer have.

Grief changes with the seasons. In winter it wants knit blankets and iron-clad excuses for cancelled plans. It hides beneath layers, content to be carried quietly underneath sweaters and scarves. But June is painful in a different way. June asks me to leave the apartment. It asks me to sit in parks, to drink orange wine on rooftops, to linger on the dance floor because the music is still playing. It asks my body to exist in the open.

And grief, I’ve learned, does not like to stay hidden in the heat.

It leaks out of me with the sweat.

It gathers in the crevice of my collarbone while I wait for the 1 train, knowing I’m going to pass the street you live on. It lives on the back of my neck as I walk home in ninety-degree weather. It catches every time I see a bird with ridiculous little legs hopping across the sidewalk, and for one tiny second I reach for my phone because you would've loved this one. Then I remember. You are no longer someone I tell small things to.

Summer is so full of movement that there is nowhere for sadness to sit politely. It spills.

It gathers behind my sunglasses while everyone else talks about going to the beach and vacation plans and the new person they’re seeing. I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand and sometimes I can’t tell if what I’m brushing away is sweat or another small piece of missing you.

I thought by now grief would have become something cleaner. Something folded neatly into the back of a drawer that I could take out only when I chose to. I used to be good at that.

But instead, missing you has become humidity.

It settles over every conversation. Every walk home. Every warm evening that lasts longer than it should. It clings to my skin like residue you can’t scrub off. It follows me into places where I swear I didn't bring you.

I know that with time, I will think of you less. I just wish I didn’t have to.

People imagine moving on as a single final decision. As though one morning you'll wake up lighter: you’ll wake up, stretch your arms over your head, and discover that the person who occupied entire neighborhoods inside your mind quietly packed their things overnight and slipped out before dawn. But it isn’t like that.

It is actively choosing not to check your phone when you know they haven’t called. It’s deleting the message you almost send. It’s going on a date with someone you met on a night out just because they asked nicely and chose the bar 6 days in advance. It’s passing the places that still know your name without asking them to remember yours.

It is a hundred tiny betrayals against the version of yourself that still hopes you might change your mind. It is refusing to feed the version of yourself that still believes one more conversation could rearrange the ending. Even when the tarot readers on TikTok insist you’re thinking of me too. Especially then.

But moving on requires thousand microscopic decisions.

And I am making them. Because I have to.

The hardest part is that none of those decisions erase what came before. They don’t make me love you less than I did. They don’t rewrite the late mornings spent tangled up together, or the way I learned the geography of your face before I knew I will someday have to forget it. They don’t make the almost disappear.

They simply ask me to carry it differently.

I wish they didn’t.

I wish love ended with a clean incision instead of a bruise that changes color over months. Purple, green, yellow. I wish there were some version of healing that didn’t require leaving pieces of myself behind. I wish I didn’t have to become someone who no longer reaches for you instinctively.

I wish I didn’t have to prove that I can survive the absence of someone I didn’t want to lose.

But June doesn’t care what I wish.

June keeps arriving.

The air stays heavy and thick. The sidewalks shimmer in the sunlight. Children scream and chase ice cream trucks. Couples hold hands without realizing what a miracle it is to have someone whose hand still reaches back. Life continues with the indifference it has always possessed.

The city keeps choosing joy with an almost offensive confidence. And despite every selfish part of me that wants to stay in bed, drink too much wine, and mourn a relationship that never happened, I keep choosing it too.

I laugh now before remembering I am supposed to be heartbroken. I smile at my friends and they smile back. I make plans I don’t secretly hope you’ll interrupt. Some mornings I wake up and it takes over five minutes before I think of you at all.

Maybe healing isn’t forgetting, or getting angry, or wishing I never met you.

Maybe it’s discovering that life starts growing around the empty space instead of trying to fill it. Like grass through cracked concrete. Like vines climbing abandoned buildings. Like summer insisting on itself after every impossible winter.

It’s June.

I still think of you.

But the thought no longer feels like drowning.

It feels like dancing in the heat long enough to realize my shirt is soaked through. The grief is still leaving me. Drop by drop. Evaporating almost as quickly as it appears.

If you are reading this, I’m sorry. BUT, I did explicitly tell you to stop reading my writing for both of our sakes.

thank you for reading <3

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Everything I’ve ever loved leaves with claw marks on it.

David Foster Wallace wrote something like that once, and because I am incapable of leaving a perfectly good thought alone, I would like to add that I definitely left bite marks too.

I’ve always been a biter.

Not in a cool, mysterious, femme fatale way. Not always in a sexy way either. More like the way toddlers bite. Like the way a dog carries around a tennis ball that is clearly too large for its mouth because it simply does not know what else to do.

I have always been overwhelmed by affection.

When I love something, my first instinct is to move closer to it. Closer. Closer than necessary.

I want to hold it. Memorize it. Press my face against it like a cat greeting a houseguest. I want proof that it exists. I want to know that something beautiful is real before it has the chance to disappear.

This has been true for people, places, songs, books, and, regrettably, fish*. _{*more on that later}

Not because love is violent. Not because I am cruel. But because every animal holds on ferociously before it lets go. There is something ancient and instinctive in me that has never learned how to touch anything lightly. I have spent my whole life reaching desperately for things with both hands, pulling them closer, memorizing them, pressing them against my chest as if I could somehow convince time to behave differently.

Lately, I keep returning to a sentence people love to say.

What is meant for you will find you.

It is supposed to be comforting. It should be. It is a nice little sentence to put on a candle or a piece of wall art or send to someone who is crying in the bathroom after a breakup like I was a week ago.

But every time I hear it, another question appears right behind it.

If what is mine will find me, what do I do with all the things that found me and left?

Because they did find me.

The friends who carried me through impossible years found me. The lovers who made entire seasons of my life glow found me. The people who taught me tenderness, disappointment, courage, longing, grief, and joy found me.

And then they left.

For a long time, I thought their leaving meant I had misunderstood something. Maybe they were never mine. Maybe permanence was the proof. Maybe anything that ended had failed some invisible test I didn’t know I was taking.

But I don’t think that is true anymore.

When I was little, I used to take my fish out of the bowl so I could hold them.

My mother would walk into the room and find me standing there with a dripping purple betta fish cradled in my palms like it was my tiny aquatic baby. She would laugh and tell me I was going to kill it.

She was right.

Eventually one slipped out of my hands and disappeared beneath my dresser. By the time I found it, its little body was still.

What I think about now is not the stupidity of the act but the sincerity of it. I wasn’t trying to hurt the fish. I just loved it.

I was five years old and already trying to solve the impossible problem of attachment. Even then, I could not understand the distance between loving something and letting it be. It wasn’t enough to know the fish was there, swimming stupid little circles around the bowl. I needed the slick scales against my fingertips. I needed proof. Proof it was real. Proof it was mine. Proof it would not disappear the second I looked away.

Looking back, I think I have loved people exactly that way my entire life.

Not elegantly. Not casually. Not with the effortless cool detachment that seems to come so naturally to some people.

I have never wanted the outline of someone. I want details.

I want to know why you hate Halloween. I want to know what you wanted to be when you were eight years old and what happened to that version of you. I want to know the song you play when you are driving home alone at night. I want to know what you pretend not to care about. I want to know the shape of your fears and the shape of your joy.

The details collect as you begin to know someone. A phrase they say all the time. The way they wrinkle their nose when they’re being photographed. The restaurant order they’ve memorized so thoroughly they don’t need a menu anymore. The story they tell at parties. The story they don’t tell at parties. Tiny things. Ridiculous things.

Things that seem meaningless until one day you realize you have quietly built an entire world around somebody.

And that is the terrible thing about loving people.

You never notice how much space they take up until they are gone.

A friend drifts away. A lover changes their mind. A relationship ends. And suddenly there is this enormous empty space where an entire person used to exist.

You still reach for your phone. You still save the meme. You still hear a song and think, “I need to send this to them.” And then you remember.

There is nowhere left to send it.

Nobody talks enough about that part. The slightly humiliating part. The part where your love keeps showing up even after it has nowhere to go.

This is when heartbreak becomes less poetic.

Sometimes it is just walking around your own mind like a house you cannot move out of. Returning to the same rooms. Running your fingers along the same dust-coated pictures on the wall. Looking for a door that you know is locked.

Your body remembers people long after your brain has accepted the ending.

But somehow, they never really leave.

I have lost people and still find them everywhere.

I find them in bookstores when I reach automatically for something they would have loved. I find them in restaurants where I already know what they would order. I find them in songs. In new cities. In random moments when my brain briefly forgets and thinks, I should tell them about this.

Most of all, I find them in myself.

In the versions of me that only exist because they existed first.

The music I listen to. The way I speak. The things I believe. The things I want. The things I will never tolerate again.

Every person I have loved has rearranged something inside of me before leaving. And yes, they’ve left some claw marks. But the bite marks are hard to heal for different reasons.

Maybe because you can only bite something you are close enough to kiss.

Claw marks typically heal in clean lines. A small scar left behind.

Bite marks linger. They bruise beneath the surface. They bloom before they fade. Sometimes they break skin and leave some infectious organism underneath. Sometimes they leave behind a tenderness you can still feel years later.

Because there is something terrifying about being known.

Not admired, not wanted, known.

To let another person see you when you are crying. Or jealous. Or scared. Or hopeful. Or needy. Human.

To let someone witness the parts of you that you spend your whole life trying to hide is an act of enormous trust. And losing someone who knew you like that does not feel like losing a person. It feels like losing a secret language you learned with them.

People love to comfort grief by reminding you that there will be other people. But if your childhood dog dies, nobody tells you that there are other dogs. If your house burns down, nobody immediately tells you there are other houses you can move into.

The grief comes from the specificity. This laugh. This voice. This person. This exact set of fingerprints on your life.

Maybe that is why I am starting to think the problem was never that things left. Maybe the problem was that I thought my job was to keep them. Maybe what is meant for us does find us. Maybe we (I) just confuse finding with staying. Maybe some things arrive to live beside us forever. Maybe some things arrive to change us and then continue on.

A lesson, a wound, a memory. A version of ourselves we would have never discovered alone.

The problem has never been loving. I have always known how to love. The problem has been loosening my grip.

I have spent so much of my life clenching. Holding and bracing, treating every ending like proof that I failed. As though enough love could stop someone from leaving. As though enough devotion could freeze time.

But the fish was always going to need water. Autumn was always going to become winter. The song was always going to end. And people, no matter how deeply we love them, have always belonged to themselves before they belonged to us.

The clenched jaw changes nothing.

The tight fist changes nothing.

All it does is exhaust the person holding on. And I’m tired.

Maybe growing up is learning that love is not the same thing as possession. Maybe love is opening your hand. Opening your mouth. Maybe it is saying: thank you for finding me, and thank you for staying. Thank you for changing me. And when it is time, thank you for leaving me with something to carry.

Maybe letting go is not some dramatic moment where you suddenly become wise and healed.

Maybe it is much smaller.

Maybe it is simply relaxing your jaw.

Uncurling your fingers.

Taking the thing you loved out of your mouth and letting it breathe.

The people I loved will continue living inside me. Not as wounds. Not as things I failed to keep.

As evidence. Evidence that I was here. Evidence that they were here. Evidence that even for a brief and impossible moment, two lives found each other and changed shape.

Everything I’ve ever loved leaves with claw marks on it. Bite marks too.

And every person I’ve ever loved has left them on me.

The marks are not proof that I lost. They are proof that I held something beautiful. And maybe that has enough.

Maybe my job was never to keep anything forever. Maybe my job was just to love it while it was in my hands.

And when it is time: relax my jaw, open my hands, and let it go.

thank you for reading <3

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Love is not enough.

Maybe that is the hardest lesson dating has to offer. Not that love is rare. Not that love disappears. Not even that love hurts. The hardest lesson is discovering that love can exist fully, undeniably, beautifully, and still fail to become a future. We are taught that love is the thing that overcomes obstacles. The thing that justifies risk. The thing that makes everything else fall into place.

We grow up believing that if two people care enough, the rest will somehow sort itself out. But sometimes love arrives and nothing falls into place at all. Sometimes it arrives and simply sits there between two people, alive and undeniable, while reality remains stubbornly unchanged.

Maybe that is why this kind of heartbreak feels impossible to explain. It is a door. Not a locked door, a locked door would be merciful. A locked door offers certainty. You knock. You pull the handle. It doesn’t move. The answer is immediate. The silence tells you everything you need to know. You grieve it. You leave.

The cruelest doors are the ones left slightly open. The ones that let light spill through the crack. The ones that open just enough for a hand to reach through, just enough for a voice to call your name, just enough for hope to survive. The ones that make someone believe there is still something worth waiting for.

So they wait.

And waiting is exhausting, not because nothing is happening, but because everything is happening all at once. Every possible future remains alive. Every possibility continues breathing. Hope and grief sit side by side at the same table, each insisting it knows what comes next.

It feels like hearing footsteps on the other side and wondering whether they are coming closer or moving away.

It feels like standing outside a door and knowing someone is there. Knowing they can hear you. Knowing they know you’re waiting.

And still, the lock remains in place.

At first, they think they are only waiting for a moment. One more conversation. One more date. One more night spent tangled together on the couch. One more forehead kiss. One more late-morning walk. One more look across the room. Then surely, they’ll know. Surely, the answer is right around the corner. But certainty never arrives all at once. Instead, they begin building a life in the hallway.

They learn the grain of the wood beneath their fingertips. Memorize the sounds from inside the house. Become fluent in tiny shifts and subtle movements. They collect evidence.

The way he reaches for their hand. The way he remembers things mentioned weeks ago. The way his face softens when he sees them. The way he reaches for them in his sleep. The way he looks at them sometimes, and for one dangerous second it feels as though the answer has finally revealed itself. There. There it is. That look must mean something. This cannot be nothing.

But heartbreak often begins where certainty should be.

Because there are so many versions of wanting. Someone can want your body and not your future. Someone can want your company and not your heart. Someone can want you on Friday night and not on Tuesday morning. Someone can want you deeply and still not know what to do with that feeling. Someone can love you and still be unable to choose you. That is the possibility nobody prepares you for.

Not unrequited love, but reciprocated love with nowhere to go.

The touch is real. The sweetness is real. The way they watch you when they don’t think you’re looking is real. The way they feed you from their hands is real. The way they carry you bridal-style down the street is real. The way they pull you closer in their sleep is real. The way they kiss you like they have spent days starving and you are the first thing that has ever felt like nourishment is real. All of it is real. That is the tragedy. Because those things look so much like choosing.

But they are not.

Choosing is not something a person does with their hands. It is not something they do with their mouth. It is not something they do in fleeting moments when affection comes easily. Choosing is something a person does with their life.

And that is the bleeding wound at the center of all of this.

To be cared for deeply but not claimed. To be loved, perhaps, but not chosen. To know exactly what could be built with someone while they remain unable to pick up the first brick. To watch a future flicker between two people like candlelight and slowly realize that no matter how beautiful the flame is, it cannot survive on hope alone.

The mind fights this reality because it wants fairness. It wants equations. It wants effort to equal reward. It wants love to equal commitment. But human beings have never obeyed equations. Love is not leverage. Love is not a contract. Love is not a guarantee. Love is simply a truth. What people do with that truth is another matter entirely.

And maybe that is why waiting becomes so humiliating. Because eventually the person standing in the hallway knows better. They know a doorway is not a home. They know someone who intends to let them in does not leave them standing outside. They know self-respect should be stronger than hope

And yet, hope survives.

Hope is greedy. Hope can survive on almost nothing. A lingering glance. A hand finding another instinctively. A confession. A moment of vulnerability. A kiss that feels too sincere to be meaningless.

The heart gathers these moments obsessively. Carries them around like loose change. Turns them over and over in its hands searching for certainty hidden inside them.

Waiting disguises itself as patience. As understanding. As maturity. It whispers that timing is complicated. That certainty takes time. That people need space.

But waiting is never passive.

Waiting costs something. It asks a person to stand still while their life continues moving around them. It asks them to live inside a question mark.

Maybe that is the terrible miracle of the door. Until it opens, both futures remain alive. The one where everything works out. The one where it falls apart before it ever truly begins. Both breathing. Both waiting. Both standing silently on opposite sides of a thin piece of wood.

Maybe this is how love begins sometimes. Or maybe not.

Maybe that is why leaving feels impossible.

Because a closed door can be mourned, but a cracked one keeps negotiating. It keeps whispering, “maybe.”

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe soon. Maybe after one more conversation. Maybe after one more month. Maybe after one more act of devotion.

And so, the knocking continues.

Softly at first. Then more desperately. Not because the person outside believes the other cannot hear them, but because they know they can.

That is the heartbreak.

Not that the knocks went unanswered. That they were heard. They heard them when clarity was requested. They heard them in every vulnerable confession. They heard them in every conversation.

They heard them in every trembling attempt to say, “I am here. I want in. I am willing to love you. I am willing to choose you.”

And despite hearing all of it, despite caring, despite feeling something real, the door never opened.

Maybe one person is standing in the hallway imagining a room that the other never intended to enter. Maybe some people are capable of creating entire worlds inside another person without ever intending to stay there. And if that is true, then eventually the waiting itself becomes the answer.

Because love cannot make a decision. Love cannot choose courage. Love cannot choose readiness. Love cannot choose a future. People do.

And sometimes they don’t.

No matter how beautiful the love is. No matter how genuine. No matter how rare.

That is the grief. Not losing the love. Losing the belief that love would be enough.

Because the deepest tragedies are not the stories where nobody loved at all. They are the stories where love was standing right there, alive and breathing, and still could not save anyone. Maybe heartbreak is simply mourning the limits of love. Mourning the terrible, ordinary truth that two people can find something beautiful, something real, something worth keeping, and still fail to carry it forward.

Nobody tells you this beforehand. Nobody tells you that someone can look at you like you are everything they have ever wanted and still fail to choose you. Nobody tells you that love and a future are not the same thing. You only learn it standing in the hallway, staring at a door that never quite opens, holding all the love you meant to give someone, and realizing that someday another person will take it from your hands as though it is the most natural thing in the world.

No hesitation. No uncertainty. No doorway.

Just an open door and an invitation to come inside.

Love was here. The longing was here. The possibility was here.

And still, somehow, it was not enough.

thank you for reading <3

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I don’t mean what it does in theory, or in poetry, or in the safe distance of hindsight. I mean, what it actually does. What it does to the body. What it does to your attention. What it does to an otherwise normal Thursday afternoon when you realize you’ve spent twenty minutes staring out the window thinking about someone who, a few months ago, did not exist in your life at all.

I mean the particular magic and horror of watching a stranger become significant.

One day, they are simply another person moving through the world. Then, somehow, they become someone to you. Someone you want to tell things to. Someone you instinctively reach for when something funny happens, or beautiful happens, or terrible happens. Someone whose name begins appearing in your thoughts with such frequency that it starts to feel less like thinking and more like haunting.

How can I celebrate that, knowing what comes next?

Because I am old enough now to know that love is not harmless.

I have seen what it leaves behind.

I have watched people construct entire futures out of hope and chemistry and late-night conversations, only to find themselves standing in the wreckage of something they were certain would last. I know what it feels like to miss someone so thoroughly that they seem to leak into every corner of your life. I know how absence behaves after intimacy. How it refuses to stay in its designated place. How it follows you into grocery stores and train rides and Tuesday mornings. How a person can leave and still somehow remain.

Love leaves fingerprints on everything it touches.

That is what makes it beautiful. That is also what makes it dangerous.

Lately, I have been thinking about something Ethan Hawke said in a red carpet interview:

“The one who’s in love always wins. It doesn’t matter if you get your heart broken. You’re living. When you’re feeling, you’re alive. The sun doesn’t care whether the grass appreciates its rays. It just keeps on shining.”

The first time I heard it, I thought it was bullshit.

Or maybe I thought he had never stared at a phone waiting for a text message that wasn’t coming. It sounded like something people say when they are already on the other side of it. A way of turning something unresolved into something meaningful. A beautiful idea. Something you repeat when you don’t know what else to do with the fact that you cared. The emotional equivalent of putting flowers on a grave.

But I keep returning to it. My friends remind me of it. I want to believe it.

Because something is happening inside me that refuses to dismiss it.

Not because I think love always works out, not because I believe that wanting someone guarantees they’ll want you back.

God, if only.

What interests (and concerns) me is that strange period before any of that is known. The part nobody writes enough about. The part where the feeling is already real, but the future is still completely invisible.

Because that is where I find myself now.

I know what I feel. That much is undeniable.

I know that my day brightens after I hear from you. I know that certain songs have become unbearable because they remind me of you. I know that I have begun carrying you around with me in the quiet corners of my life. Into the line at the coffee shop. Into the shower. Into the few minutes before sleep, when the mind loosens its grip on practicality and starts wandering toward whatever it wants most.

I know that I want something from you.

What I don’t know is what you want from me.

And to be fair, I don’t think you know either.

But some days, I think you do.

Some days I think you’re standing exactly where I am, feeling this same strange pull and trying not to look directly at it. Some days I think we’re both circling the same thing, each hoping the other will be brave enough to name it first.

And then there are days when I feel completely ridiculous. Days when I wonder if I have built an entire cathedral out of a handful of moments. Days when I suspect you are moving through your life normally, while I am over here thinking about how you let me sit in your lap at karaoke.

This is the humiliation of hope.

Not heartbreak, not yet.

Hope.

Heartbreak comes later.

Hope is what happens before. I thought I was done with hoping.

Clearly, that is not true.

Hope is the vulnerable thing. Hope is the thing that keeps you awake. Hope is the thing that convinces you to keep looking for evidence. The thing that makes you reevaluate old conversations. The thing that turns uncertainty into a place you somehow continue returning to, even though it offers absolutely no shelter. No assurance.

And yet I cannot help thinking about it.

Because beneath all the confusion, beneath all the analysis and speculation and second-guessing, there is something undeniably beautiful about the fact that I am capable of feeling this way at all. There is something undeniably beautiful about what I am experiencing.

The world feels more alive when you care about someone. Not safer. Certainly not easier. But undeniably alive.

Ordinary moments develop a strange luminosity. A Tuesday morning acquires significance simply because you shared it with someone. The future stops feeling sealed and starts feeling open again in ways that are almost hard to look at directly. Another person is moving through the world, and their existence begins to alter the texture of your own.

What happens now is unclear.

What I do know is that when I wake up in the morning, the world feels slightly different because you are in it.

I find myself wanting you in all the ordinary places of my life, without knowing what it means to want you this much yet. I want you, in the simplest way I know how to say it, without turning it into something it has to become.

And maybe that is where I am. Not at certainty. Not at conclusion.

Just here, still learning the shape of this feeling, trying not to name it too quickly, because things are good, and I don’t want to force them into anything they are not ready to be.

I just hope, in the same quiet way, that you are here too.

Somewhere in it.

Somewhere near it.

Somewhere I don’t have to reach too far to find you.

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There is a question that keeps rising to the surface of my throat, delicate and humiliating.

Do you feel like this with anyone else?

I try to dress it up before I say it. I try to make it casual, almost ironic, like I don’t already know how much the answer matters. I pretend it’s curiosity instead of hunger. But it isn’t. It’s never just curiosity. It’s the quiet, aching need to know if what is happening to me is singular, or if I am just stepping into a role that has already been rehearsed.

If I ask, if I actually let it leave my mouth, there is no answer that won’t cost me something.

If you say no, it doesn’t feel like this with anyone else, then suddenly this becomes real in a way I can’t dilute. I would have to hold it as something chosen. Something that could be lost. Something that will hurt.

But if you say yes, it has felt like this before, it could feel like this again, you move through the world regularly inspiring this kind of devastating ache in people, then that is somehow worse. What am I supposed to do with that information? How am I supposed to survive knowing I have become just another room you once stood in and lit on fire?

Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?

Because I am behaving like a person who has forgotten her own rules. Or maybe worse: like someone who remembers them perfectly and is ignoring them on purpose.

It’s true, I have historically been detached on purpose. I built that detachment carefully, like a house designed to withstand any possible storm. I put windows in it, but they never opened. I decorated it with independence and called it freedom. I invited people inside and said, “Look how comfortable I am here,” as if comfort and safety were the same thing. But really it was just a place engineered to keep everything at a manageable distance. Nothing could get too close. I became fluent in the language of almost. Almost wanting. Almost needing. Almost staying. I am very good at being almost in love.

Usually, I stand slightly to the side of my own life. I narrate. I observe. I keep a small, controllable distance so that nothing can rush me all at once. I know how to turn intensity into something manageable instead of dangerous. I know how to leave before I am left. I know how to make desire feel contained, civilized, survivable.

But then. There’s a then in this one.

I watch you look at me and it feels different. And it’s scary. Not because there is anything overtly frightening about you, but because there is something frightening about what happens to me in your presence.

You listen to me past the point where most people stop listening. You pay attention in a way that feels almost invasive. Like you are carefully collecting pieces of me without announcing it.

My face betrays me. My body betrays me. I am pink and obvious and a little bit dazzled in your presence, which is not a position I typically enjoy being in.

Usually, I am composed. Usually, I know exactly how I am being perceived. I carefully manufactured that version of myself. But around you I become strangely visible to myself. I hear my own laugh getting softer, warmer, less controlled. I catch myself leaning toward you before I realize I’m doing it. My entire body seems to reach for you a half second before my brain can intervene.

This does not feel manageable.

So yes, I am scared.

Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?

Do you touch other people like this? Like they are something both fragile and inevitable. Do your hands learn them slowly, then all at once? Do you notice the places where they tense and soften, the invisible maps beneath their skin? Do you think about them afterward when there is nothing to feel at all? Do you find yourself reaching for the memory of them the way a tongue searches for a missing tooth? Do you carry pieces of them around after they leave?

Or is this new for you too? It can’t be.

Because it is new for me. That is the terrifying thing.

I am used to desire. Desire is easy. You can manufacture it in a dark room after two drinks and the right mood. I have mistaken attention for intimacy before. I have mistaken being wanted for being seen. But this feels quieter than that. More dangerous because of how much I care.

You make me feel observed in the most precise way. Not consumed. Not conquered. Just noticed.

And I don’t think people understand how disarming that can be.

To be noticed is to lose your camouflage. Suddenly all the little performances stop working. I cannot arrange myself correctly around you. I cannot act detached enough to protect myself from the fact that I wait for your calls with my entire body. That I replay things you’ve said to me while I’m washing dishes, while I’m crossing the street, while I’m trying to fall asleep.

Sometimes I catch myself becoming superstitious about it. I recall our conversations looking for proof. Here, you remembered this. Here, you reached for me first. Here, you looked at me like the room had gone quiet around my body. I inventory your affection like someone preparing for a famine.

Tell me. Is it real?

Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?

Because I already know what happens if you don’t.

If this is singular, if this is rare, then I will have to admit that I want something from you. That I really want something from you. Something with actual weight to it. Not just chemistry. Not just fascination. Something embarrassingly sincere. I will have to admit that when you touch me, something in me goes still in relief. That I am beginning to imagine you in the quiet parts of my life. Your hand at the small of my back in a kitchen. Your face half asleep beside mine. The terrifying intimacy of ordinary tenderness.

It seems that nothing happens for a long time and then suddenly everything happens all at once.

One day you are carefully protecting your solitude, carrying your life alone in both hands like something slightly fragile but mostly manageable, and the next day someone is standing in your doorway in a button-up shirt making your body feel like a live wire. Someone is cradling your face, kissing you in a way that rearranges the architecture of your loneliness. Someone is making you understand why people risk everything for love even when they know exactly how badly it can hurt.

And if this isn’t singular, if this is simply how you move through the world, leaving people dazzled and burning behind you, then I am in more trouble than I thought.

Because I can feel it.

I can feel it happening in real time. The loosening. The softening. The terrifying urge to be known. You are pulling me out from behind the glass I built around myself so carefully, and I don’t even think you realize you’re doing it.

Or maybe you do.

I keep returning to the question, because it is the only place I can still pretend I have control.

Tell me, do you feel like this with anyone else?

As if the answer might stabilize something in me. As if it might tell me whether I am standing in a pattern or a rupture. As if knowing would change anything at all.

But I am beginning to understand that it won’t.

Because whether this is rare or repeatable, whether I am one of many or something singular, does not change the fact that I am already altered by it.

And so, the question stops being about you.

It becomes something more unsettling. Something turned inward.

Not do you feel like this with anyone else.

But what am I becoming because I feel it with you?

And there is no answer to that.

Only the ongoing, irreversible fact of it.

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A friend texted me once, in response to me overanalyzing my newfound feelings for someone new, “Your heart is so beautiful, Lex. Did you know that? So much capacity to love. I love it so much.”

I stared at the message for a long time before answering. Longer than was probably normal. Some sentences do not simply pass through; they fully enter you. They sit down somewhere deep in your body and start digging around.

I had never considered my capacity to love as something beautiful before.

Exhausting, yes. Embarrassing, maybe. Occasionally humiliating. But beautiful? I don’t know. I think I had spent most of my life trying to make myself less affected by things. Less porous. Less easily moved.

My heart has always felt slightly too large for my body. It keeps pressing against the edges of my life, looking for somewhere to go.

I love too many things, and I have always known that as both a blessing and a problem.

I love the particular ache of city windows glowing at dusk when everyone is inside, beginning their evenings. I love overhearing laughter from another room. I love it when someone remembers a tiny detail about me I only mentioned once months ago. I love the smell of rain rising off hot pavement in the summer. I love people who reach across the table absentmindedly just to touch your hand while they are talking. I love the softness in someone’s face when they are looking at a person they adore and do not realize anyone is watching them.

For a long time, I thought this was a liability.

The world, after all, rewards restraint. Composure. The ability to move through things without being moved by them. There is a kind of person who seems sealed off, self-contained, untouched by anything too soft or too sharp. They look like they will survive more cleanly.

But if you start paying attention, it becomes impossible to ignore how often love is already there, already happening, already embedded in the smallest movements between people.

There is so much love hidden inside practical language. We disguise our devotion as management. As reminders. As logistics. Because saying I cannot bear the thought of something happening to you is too vulnerable, so instead we say, “let me know when you get there.”

And maybe that is why the world feels so overwhelming and so full at the same time. Because once you start recognizing love, you realize it is everywhere. Absolutely everywhere.

There is love in the man at Trader Joe’s standing frozen in front of flower buckets for fifteen straight minutes trying to choose the right bouquet for someone. Love in the girl at the pharmacy buying cold medicine, Gatorade, soup, and tissues all at once because somebody she cares about is sick. Love in roommates bringing each other home little treats from convenience stores. Love in shared headphones. Love in people walking slower (or faster) to match each other’s pace. Love in “I saw this and thought of you.” Love in the way everyone at a dinner table instinctively turns toward the person telling a story. Love in brushing crumbs off another person’s shirt.

There is love in the person who automatically moves to the outside of the sidewalk closest to traffic. Love in someone plugging your phone in when you accidentally fall asleep on the couch. Love in mothers cutting fruit into smaller pieces long after their children are old enough to do it themselves. Love in fathers carefully carrying sleeping children from the car into the house. Love in the way friends send each other pictures of sunsets, as if beauty becomes incomplete unless it is shared.

Love in people forwarding songs with no explanation except “this made me think of you.” Love in someone saving a seat beside them automatically. Love in “I made extra just in case you were hungry.” Love in waiting on the phone while another person walks home at night. Love in the way human beings keep trying to protect each other from loneliness in tiny, almost invisible ways.

Love is in the details that are so ordinary they almost disappear: a hand resting at the small of someone’s back in a crowded room so they do not get separated, a stranger stepping aside without thinking so someone else can pass more easily, a friend who remembers exactly how you take your coffee and does not turn it into a performance of knowing you, just quietly does it.

How miraculous is that? To be learned by another person like a favorite song.

And then there is the way love builds itself over time into something larger than any single moment. Roommates learning each other’s silences. Friends knowing exactly when to interrupt sadness with humor. Couples developing entire invisible systems of care: keys always in the same bowl, phones always charged in the same place, routines braided together until daily life becomes shared instinct.

And maybe that is why heartbreak feels so enormous when it comes. Love teaches you what is possible between two people. It reveals how much of human life is built around our desire to care for one another and be cared for in return. Once you understand the magnitude of that gift, its absence becomes impossible to ignore.

Sometimes I think love is the closest thing we have to magic, not because it is rare, but because it transforms everything it touches.

Love becomes geography without asking permission. A city becomes different once someone you adore lives there. A street becomes sacred because something important once happened there. A kitchen becomes a place where laughter once bent someone in half. A song becomes unbearable or precious depending on who played it and when. Objects become archives. Places become shrines.

Entire years of your life become illuminated by the fact that somebody loved you there.

And romantic love, when it appears, is not separate from this; it is just more concentrated. It is someone buying you a toothbrush to keep at their house, a soft kiss in the doorway, a future tense that slowly becomes plural without discussion. It is the way someone folds you into the rhythm of their day until it feels like you were always meant to be there.

What lingers most is not love at its loudest, but love as it starts to become instinct. Arms wrapped around your waist while water boils. Someone turning toward you in their sleep without meaning to. A hand tracing circles on your arm while conversation continues elsewhere. The unconscious ways bodies learn each other's presence.

Love arrives first as movement, not language.

And grief, when it comes, is what happens when you realize how much of your world has been shaped by these movements. It is love’s afterimage. It is love continuing without a place to land. Not absence, but overflow. Not emptiness, but evidence.

Even loneliness is evidence of love. You cannot miss connection unless your heart already knows what it is reaching for.

And all of this, this constant, ordinary, unremarkable devotion, only becomes visible when you start to pay attention. When you let yourself notice how often people are reaching for each other without ceremony.

That noticing changes the scale of everything. It makes the world both heavier and more astonishing. Heavier, because you see how much care is always being carried. Astonishing, because you see that it is actually being carried at all, and so constantly.

There is something remarkable about a species that keeps doing this. That keeps remembering each other. That keeps showing up in small ways. That keeps choosing, over and over again, to soften toward one another instead of away.

Love is everywhere.

In packed lunches. In voicemails saved for years. In jackets draped over shoulders. In umbrellas tilted sideways to cover another person more fully. In fingers intertwined under restaurant tables. In remembering preferences. In walking someone to their car. In forehead kisses. In shared silence. In waiting rooms. In bedtime phone calls. In “send me a picture when you get there.” In the instinct to reach for another hand during turbulence.

In someone grabbing your favorite snack at the store without asking, because it no longer occurs to them not to think of you. In people saying “be careful” when what they really mean is “your existence matters enormously to me.”

In ordinary devotion. In repetition. In attention.

By people saying, again and again, in a thousand different languages: I thought of you. I remembered you. I want you safe. I want you happy. I am glad you exist.

Love is everywhere.

Absolutely everywhere.

And there is something really beautiful about being alive in the middle of it, able to notice it at all.

I didn’t realize I was boarding up the windows of my heart until the light inside me stopped feeling present tense. It became something historical. Something I remembered instead of something I still lived inside.

That is the strange thing about the loss of tenderness: you rarely notice it while it is happening.

No one wakes up one morning and decides to become unreachable. It happens quietly. Incrementally. Through accumulation. Through enough disappointments arriving close enough together that self-protection stops feeling like a temporary instinct and starts feeling like an identity. A person leaves. Then another. Then another almost-love dissolves under the weight of timing or fear or incompatibility. Another conversation ends with you pretending not to care as much as you do. Another grief settles itself carefully inside your body until hope itself begins to feel embarrassing.

And eventually, without realizing it, you begin restructuring yourself around the anticipation of loss.

You become careful.

Not obviously. Not in ways anyone else would immediately recognize. You still go out. You still laugh loudly at dinner tables and flirt in crowded bars and let people kiss you at the ends of long nights. You still participate in the rituals of intimacy. But somewhere deep inside, tenderness begins retreating room by room, like someone quietly extinguishing lights in a house.

You become harder to reach even to yourself.

Desire becomes observational instead of immersive. You can see intimacy happening around you. You can mimic it beautifully. But you are never entirely inside it anymore. Some part of you remains standing near the exit, emotionally half-packed already, preparing for departure before arrival has even finished unfolding.

That is how self-protection disguises itself. Not as fear, but as wisdom.

And I became very wise.

I learned how to make myself untouchable in ways that looked healthy from the outside. I cultivated independence so thoroughly that it became indistinguishable from isolation. I built a life so textured and vibrant and undeniably beautiful that no one, not even me, could immediately identify the loneliness threaded quietly through it.

My friends admired me. “Your life is epic,” one of them texted me once.

And she was right. It was. It is.

I filled my days expertly. Music. Friends. Long nights stretching carelessly into morning. Lovers who occupied space in my bed but never fully entered the deeper rooms of me. Books stacked beside my bed with folded pages and underlined sentences. Entire futures imagined carefully enough that no one else was required to help carry them.

I became extraordinarily good at surviving myself.

That is the complicated thing about loneliness as you grow older: it becomes aesthetic. Curated. Elegant, even. You learn how to decorate your solitude until it begins resembling peace. And maybe some of it was peace. But some of it was grief with excellent lighting.

Because beneath all the beauty of my life was a quieter belief I rarely admitted out loud: maybe tenderness had already happened to me.

Past tense.

Maybe I had already experienced the deepest loves available to me in this lifetime. Maybe some people only receive a few moments of true emotional devastation before becoming witnesses instead of participants. People who remember tenderness vividly but no longer expect to encounter it again.

There was sadness in that belief. But there was relief too.

Because once you decide tenderness no longer belongs to you, you stop searching for it. You stop looking at every new connection like it might alter the emotional landscape of your life. You stop exposing the softest parts of yourself to uncertainty. You stop risking humiliation. You stop waiting.

And after enough time, numbness begins to resemble stability.

That is the dangerous part. The way hardening can masquerade as healing. The way detachment can masquerade as maturity. The way surviving heartbreak can slowly become avoiding aliveness altogether.

I thought growth meant needing less. I thought wisdom meant distance. I thought healing meant becoming untouchable enough that nobody could ever truly wound me again.

But hearts are strange things.

Even abandoned rooms remember how to hold light.

And tenderness has a way of returning.

Quietly.

The return of tenderness is not a lightning strike. It is not some cinematic revelation where the entire world changes overnight. It is softer than that. Slower. More disorienting.

More like winter thawing beneath the soil before the surface understands spring has begun.

At first, it barely registers. A moment lingering too long. A touch that startles you with its gentleness. The realization that someone’s presence has begun rearranging the emotional weather inside you. The frightening awareness that beneath all the armor you spent years constructing, something living still exists there.

Still capable of ache.

Still capable of longing.

Still capable of hope.

I think that was what shocked me most, not love itself, but the return of tenderness after I had spent so long treating tenderness as a liability.

To feel yourself softening again after hardening around your own hurt is deeply disorienting. It is terrifying to realize someone has slipped past every defense you built without ever trying to conquer you. And suddenly there you are, standing in front of another person holding all your old grief in trembling hands, saying: despite everything, here.

Here is my heart again.

Not untouched. Not innocent. Not naive.

A heart fully aware of what love can cost. A heart that understands exactly how unbearable loss can become and still continues reaching toward connection anyway.

I think that is what makes the return of tenderness feel sacred.

Not innocence, but willingness.

The willingness to remain soft in a world that rewards distance. The willingness to feel deeply again after convincing yourself depth was dangerous. The willingness to reopen every shuttered window inside yourself knowing exactly how cold the air can become once the house is open again.

Because healing, I think, is not the removal of vulnerability. It is the return of tenderness without shame.

It is learning not to treat your softness like a character flaw. Learning not to confuse cynicism with intelligence. Learning that caring deeply is not weakness, but proof that grief did not calcify you completely.

For years I believed the safest version of myself was the least reachable one. The girl who needed nothing. The girl who could leave first. The girl who never let anyone see the full depth of her wanting.

But she was not freer.

Just lonelier.

The truth is, my heart was never dead. Only shuttered.

The light inside me never disappeared. The rooms were never empty. I had simply stopped opening the curtains because I no longer believed anyone or anything could make those abandoned places feel alive again.

But the return of tenderness changes the architecture of a person.

Suddenly the locked house inside you begins breathing again. Windows open. Dust lifts into sunlight. Air moves through forgotten rooms.

And you realize healing was never about becoming untouchable.

It was about becoming reachable again.

Now when I picture myself, I no longer imagine darkness or locked doors or silence stretching endlessly through abandoned halls. I imagine every window thrown open. Curtains moving gently in the wind. Late afternoon light spilling across the floorboards. A house alive again after years of mistaking survival for living.

And for the first time in years, tenderness no longer feels dangerous to me.

It feels like a return.

A crush is a tiny private emergency.

It is absurd how quickly another person can reorganize the architecture of your mind. One day, you are unfazed. Efficient. Rational. You answer emails on time. You buy groceries like a person with a stable internal ecosystem. Then suddenly, someone touches the small of your back while moving past you in a crowded bar, or smiles at you a half a beat too long, and your entire nervous system lights up like a city after a blackout.

A crush does not arrive politely. It detonates.

And the humiliation of it is not just wanting someone. It is becoming visible to yourself through the wanting.

Suddenly, you are aware of your own body in the unbearable way people become aware of a tongue in their mouth once it’s mentioned. Your voice sounds unfamiliar. Your laugh becomes either too loud or suspiciously restrained. You become conscious of where your hands are resting, whether your posture looks accidental, whether you seem desirable in an effortless way or in a trying-too-hard way. You reread texts like they are ancient scripture requiring interpretation. A period can ruin your evening. An exclamation point can resurrect it. You become a detective in the very stupidest investigation alive.

Crushes make intellectual hostages out of otherwise competent adults.

And the worst part is that they are often built on almost nothing.

Not love. Not intimacy. Barely even knowledge.

Potential.

A crush is a relationship almost entirely conducted inside your own imagination, which is precisely why it feels so enormous. The less you know someone, the more room there is for projection. A crush is part real person, part narrative invention, part unresolved hunger. Sometimes the person themselves is almost incidental. What matters is the ache they activate in you. The specific flavor of wanting they unlock.

To have a crush is to suddenly become aware of your own appetite.

Not just for romance, but for recognition. For specificity. For being singled out in a world that often feels terrifyingly interchangeable. A crush says: there you are. And even more dangerously: there I am.

Because crushes are deeply narcissistic in a way nobody likes to admit. Not narcissistic in the selfish sense. Narcissistic in the psychological sense. They force you into obsession not only with the other person, but with the version of yourself reflected back through their attention. You become fascinated by who you are around them. Sharper. Softer. More alive. More aware of your own mouth. Your own neck. The exact shape your body takes when you lean against a doorway and know someone is looking.

Especially when they’re looking.

And sometimes the wanting becomes almost physically unmanageable. A crush can make you feel trapped inside your own skin. Every accidental touch feels disproportionate. Their hand at your waist while squeezing past you in a crowded room. Their knee against yours under a table. Fingers brushing your wrist while handing you a drink. Tiny contact, socially insignificant contact, and suddenly your entire body reacts like it has been plugged into a wall socket.

That is the humiliating thing about desire: how quickly it strips you of sophistication. You can be an intelligent, emotionally articulate adult woman and still feel like you might actually combust because someone ran their fingers along the top of your thigh. Your body does not care about dignity. It only cares that they touched you and that now, for the next six hours, you will replay it with forensic precision.

A crush makes you want to be perceived with almost religious intensity.

Not generally admired. Not passively approved of. Chosen. Specifically. Deliberately. You want someone to notice the details that feel closest to your private self. The cadence of your stories. The fact that you tuck your arms into your sweater when you’re cold. The way you cover your face when you are overwhelmed by compliments. A crush transforms attention into something sacred. Their gaze lands on you, and suddenly, you exist in higher resolution.

Which is why adult crushes feel so much stranger than adolescent ones.

Teenage crushes happen in the protected laboratory of becoming. Adult crushes happen in fully operational lives. They arrive alongside taxes and grief and unread emails and prescription refill reminders. They interrupt meetings. They sit beside you on the train while you pretend not to notice their knee touching yours. They make otherwise reasonable adults check whether someone watched their Instagram story and then immediately hate themselves for caring.

There is something profoundly undignified about having a crush after the age of twenty-five.

You know too much. You understand consequence now. You know attraction can rearrange entire lives. You know chemistry is not morality. You know wanting someone does not necessarily mean they are good for you. And still your body responds with the enthusiasm of a Victorian man catching sight of an ankle.

That is the terrible magic of crushes: they bypass your intelligence entirely.

A city changes when you have a crush. Everything becomes electrically charged with possibility. Songs sound autobiographical. Bars become potential origin stories. Your phone lighting up can alter the emotional temperature of your entire evening. You begin moving through life with this low-grade anticipation humming beneath everything, as though the world itself has become narratively loaded.

Even mundane life becomes cinematic.

You are suddenly aware of timing. Proximity. Chance. You begin measuring your days not in hours but in interactions. Did they text? Did they linger when they hugged you goodbye? Did they remember the thing you said last week? A crush turns you into someone exquisitely attuned to attention. Tiny gestures become enormous. Fingers under your chin can sustain you for three business days.

There is a peculiar pleasure in all this absurdity.

A crush allows you to live briefly inside possibility before reality flattens everything into definition and routine. Before someone becomes fully knowable. Before desire settles into the calmer architecture of actual intimacy. A crush exists in the shimmering space before certainty. And uncertainty, while psychologically horrible, is also incredibly alive.

Maybe that is why crushes feel almost euphoric. They sharpen the senses. Colors look brighter. Music sounds better. Your own reflection becomes newly interesting to you because you are imagining yourself through someone else’s eyes. You become both actor and audience in the theater of your own desire.

Still, I love crushes.

Even the humiliating ones. Especially the humiliating ones.

Because a crush interrupts the deadening efficiency of adulthood. It reanimates the parts of you that routine tries to kill. The hopeful part. The obsessive part. The part capable of surprise. A crush makes you porous again. Vulnerable to beauty. Vulnerable to fantasy. Vulnerable to the terrifying possibility that another person could alter the emotional texture of your life simply by existing inside it.

People like to act above crushes once they get older. They call them immature. Chemical illusions. Distractions from real life. But I think there is something deeply human in the sheer specificity of wanting someone. Not “someone,” abstractly. Them. Their voice. Their specific little mannerisms. The exact way they say your name. Against impossible odds, in a world overcrowded with people, something inside you rises up and says: there.

That feels meaningful to me.

Maybe not wise. Maybe not sustainable. Maybe not even real.

But meaningful.

Still, I think it is better to be ridiculous than numb.

Better to blush. Better to ache. Better to care too much about punctuation than to move through the world untouched by anyone at all.

A crush is not love. Not usually.

It is love’s hallucination. Its rehearsal dinner. Its tiny beautiful prelude to possibility.

And sometimes, if you are lucky, it is proof that despite everything adulthood does to flatten you, you are still capable of being startled alive by another person.

I keep collecting them anyway.

I want to tell you about the song that sounded like your hands on the steering wheel at night. I want to tell you something stupid and small and alive, because you were the person who knew how to make small things feel worth saying. I want to tell you I am sorry for all the moments I treated as renewable. Every almost-conversation. Every time I thought, I’ll say it later. Every time I chose composure over honesty because I believed time was infinite and forgiving.

Ending something does not spare you from missing it.

That’s the part nobody tells you. People think grief only belongs to the person who was left. As if being the one who walked away means you walk away clean. But sometimes you end things because you know you have to. Because love became effort. Became guilt. Became silence. Because staying started to feel dishonest. And still, after all that certainty, your body continues reaching for the life you removed yourself from.

Because losing someone you chose to leave is its own kind of violence.

The slow horror of discovering how many corners of your life were built around someone else’s existence. The reflex to text them something funny before remembering you no longer do that. The instinct to turn and tell them a story. The realization that they still exist in your muscle memory long after you decided they could not exist in your future.

And when it ended, it did not end all at once. There was no singular final moment where all feeling evaporated cleanly. It happened in layers. In conversations that grew more careful. In pauses that lasted too long. In the terrible dawning realization that you could love someone and still know you could not remain inside the life you were building together.

I thought ending it would create clarity.

Instead, it created echoes.

Because now every unsaid thing has nowhere to go. Not the romantic things. Not fantasies about getting back together. Just the ordinary intimacies that survive the relationship itself. The tiny observations. The accumulated language of knowing someone closely. I still hear something and think, you would have laughed at that. I still understand certain parts of myself through the fact that you once witnessed them.

And I think what devastates me most is not losing the relationship. It’s losing the audience for the version of me that existed inside it.

You knew the context like the back of your aching hand. You knew the history behind my moods and the meanings beneath my jokes. With you, I did not have to begin at the beginning every time. I could arrive half-formed, exhausted, contradictory, and still be understood.

And maybe that’s why endings can feel strangely endless. Because the relationship stops, but the conversation inside your head does not. You keep accumulating things you want to say. Clarifications. Apologies. Small moments they would appreciate. Thoughts that still instinctively turn toward them before you catch yourself.

It is not love. Not anymore. Not the kind that asks to stay.

But there is still attachment. Still familiarity. Still the lingering ache of having once been known in real time by someone who is now inaccessible to you in that way forever.

Sometimes I think the hardest part is accepting that two things can be true simultaneously: leaving was right, and losing still hurts.

People want cleaner endings than that. They want villains or certainty or emotional closure wrapped neatly like a final scene in a movie. But most endings are less elegant. Most endings are just two people becoming incompatible while still remaining terribly important to one another.

So I carry the sentences anyway.

All the things that arrive instinctively, with nowhere to land. All the versions of conversation my brain still tries to continue out of habit. All the thoughts that still briefly belong to “us” before reality corrects them back into solitude.

And I suspect that never disappears entirely.

Not because I made the wrong choice. Not because I want to undo it. But because once someone becomes woven into the fabric of your ordinary life, removing them does not happen cleanly. It leaves threads everywhere.

The car smells like rain and perfume and something faintly chemical, like the seats have absorbed a thousand nights that weren’t ours. The back of my right thigh is stuck to the leather. Our knees knock together with every acceleration. We’re loud in that brittle, pre-event way, laughing too hard, talking too loud, already excited by the fact that we’re dressed up and going somewhere that matters.

We’re on the way to a wedding.

Which already feels like a joke.

Because a wedding is standing in front of everyone you’ve ever loved and saying, out loud, that you’re staying, and meaning it, not just in the moment, but after it. And the other person saying it back, like it’s not a question, like it’s already been decided, like it will still be true when the music stops and the room goes quiet and there’s nothing left but the two of you and the fact that you chose it.

I believe in that. In theory. I believe something can survive its own beginning, that love can outlast the part where it’s new. I’ve seen it. I’ve had it before.

Minutes earlier, I was talking about someone I’m seeing. Someone I actually like. I told them about the way they touched me, the things they said, the way it lingered after they left—and how it kind of scared me. I said I felt totally normal about it.
Which was both strategic and untrue.

And then, with perfect timing, So Easy to Fall in Love by Olivia Dean rolled through the speakers.

No build-up. No warning. Just there, like it had been waiting for me to admit it.

So easy to fall in love.

I laugh, because of course. Of course it would arrive right after I confess my thoughts about something good out loud. Like the radio is listening. Like it agrees.

Outside, the city is all reflection and motion—traffic lights smeared across wet glass, people folding into each other under umbrellas. Inside the car everything is close: perfume thick in the air, legs pressed together, tires hissing softly against pavement, a broken umbrella clicking against the floor with every turn. Someone is talking about their qualms with Hinge. Someone else is staring out the window. I’m in the middle, thinking way too hard.

“Is this song about me?”

They both turn to me.

“This is so you.”

And I laugh again, because it lands too easily. Because it always does. Like there’s no resistance point to it.

It sounds like a compliment. It is a compliment. To be the kind of person people associate with a love song. To be recognizable in something warm. To slip so easily into softness that it feels inevitable.

But what I hear underneath it is something more exposed than that.

Not that I fall in love easily.

But that I am easy to fall in love with.

I know how that sounds. But I’m not trying to be. That’s the part I can’t explain cleanly. It isn’t strategy or performance. I don’t decide to be open or warm or interesting. It’s just how I am in a room with someone I like.

I don’t ration myself. I don’t hold back warmth like it’s something to distribute carefully. I arrive open. Immediately, instinctively. I smile without meaning to. I laugh genuinely. I make eye contact that lingers without planning it. I lean in when people speak like they matter more than whatever else is happening around us. I ask questions and actually listen to the answers. I remember things they forget they’ve told me.

It just happens.

And people feel it. They soften into it. They trust it. They step closer without noticing they can now see the tiny freckles on the bridge of my nose.

For a while, it feels mutual. Clean. Effortless. Like nothing is being built because it already exists.

That’s what the song sounds like.

Like love isn’t even a decision, but recognition.

But what it doesn’t say, what I was already thinking before it even came on, is that I don’t know how much of that is me being easy to love, and how much of it is just me being easy to enter and then easier to leave.

Not in some cruel, catastrophic way. More like a tide pulling back so gradually you don’t realize how far away the water’s gone until you’re standing there alone on wet sand.

I don’t think I’ve been doing something wrong. I haven’t been chasing permanence and missing it. If anything, I’ve structured my life to avoid needing it. I’ve learned how to live in the beginning on purpose. Casual, open, unclaimed. I liked the freedom of it. The lightness. The ability to feel something without having to build anything on top of it.

So nobody stayed.

But I didn’t stay either.

And that’s the part that makes it harder to tell what I’m actually afraid of.

Because sitting there, hearing that song, thinking about the person I tell my friends about, I realized I don’t actually know what I’m scared of anymore. It’s not one thing. It’s a whole ecosystem of fears contradicting each other at once. I’m scared of being hurt. I’m scared of hurting someone else. I’m scared of losing my freedom, and I’m scared of never being loved deeply enough for losing that freedom to even become a possibility.

And the worst part is how little control I seem to have over any of it.

How one day someone is just a person, and the next they’ve threaded themselves into your routines without permission. Their name lighting up your phone changes your mood. You see something beautiful and instinctively think to send it to them. You start measuring your days around when you see them next. And it happens so quietly you can’t even identify the exact moment you crossed over from curiosity into something else.

The car slows. Gravel crunches under the tires. Rainwater reflects soft gold light across the pavement. We’re pulling up to a place where someone is about to walk down an aisle and be met by a person who stayed.

And later, during the ceremony, I watch the groom look at the bride, and it completely undoes me. Not because it’s dramatic. Because it’s so unbearably sincere. He looks at her like the rest of the room has dissolved. Like loving her isn’t a question he’s asking himself anymore. It’s just true.

And I start crying immediately. Quietly at first, then all at once. Standing there in a dress I paid way too much money for, softly holding the hand of a new friend, surrounded by soft music and flowers and people witnessing something sacred in the simplest possible form: someone saying I’m here and I’m still here.

And maybe that’s why the song hit me so hard in the first place.

Not because it’s easy to fall in love with me.

Because it is not enough.

Somewhere between the backseat of that Uber and the ceremony and the way he looked at her, I wondered if I would ever have that again. If I would let myself have it again. Not marriage, not permanence, not even forever in the cinematic sense, but that feeling of being seen in a way that doesn’t immediately make me brace for loss. The feeling of someone noticing all the ways I am soft and complicated and difficult and still moving closer instead of away.

Because that’s the part the song doesn’t mention.

Not the falling, the spark, the recognition, the ease. There are endless ways to describe how quickly something begins. But almost nothing about what happens after it matters. When it becomes a choice. When staying becomes visible.

Because staying is not a feeling. It’s not something that carries you. It’s something you do. Quietly, repeatedly, without the guarantee that it will last.

And I think I’ve lived inside beginnings because they ask less of me. It’s easier to be someone people fall for than someone who stays. Easier to keep everything in that bright, suspended moment before anything has the chance to prove itself or fall apart.

But standing there, watching him look at her like that, like leaving wasn’t even part of the conversation, I realized I don’t actually want to be the kind of person who only knows how to arrive.

I want to know what happens after the music fades.

It’s almost embarrassing, the way my face gives me away. A pathetic, quiet softening, like I haven’t learned how to hide it yet. Like I’m still someone who can be surprised by attention, like I haven’t learned better, like I don’t already know what it costs me when I let something feel this good.

It feels like a habit now, something I picked up somewhere between wanting too much and losing it anyway.

I have this instinct to prepare for endings early, before beginnings have even finished introducing themselves. I map exits while you’re still learning the shape of my name. I try to soften the future blow like it’s something I can negotiate with, like if I expect it properly, it won’t take anything from me when it comes.

It never really works like that. At least, not from my experience.

So yeah, I find myself smiling at my phone again.

Because you’re still here. That’s the simplest version of it. You’re still here in a way that feels deliberate. You touch me like I’m not temporary. You speak to me like I could exist in your future tense, like I’m not just a passing version of something that will eventually correct itself. And I do this humiliating thing where I smile at my phone—actually smile—like a person who isn’t already preparing, like I don’t feel the outline of the ending forming somewhere just out of view.

You look at me like there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. Not intensely, not performatively, just with a kind of steadiness that makes it feel obvious. You speak about me like I’m something soft and rare and slightly unreal, like I’m some godsent beautiful angel, which is honestly embarrassing to admit out loud in any context where I’m supposed to be maintaining my image as a normal adult woman with functioning judgment.

And worse, you mean it. Or it really seems like you do.

There’s nothing performative about it. It doesn’t feel like you’re trying to convince me of anything. It feels like that’s just how you see me when you look at me.

And I do this deeply human, slightly humiliating thing where I believe you. Not fully, never fully, but enough. Enough to let it in. Enough to let it settle. Enough to let it change the way the moment feels while I’m inside it.

So I let it happen.

That’s the part I don’t know how to explain. I let it be good while something in me is still quietly measuring how long “good” usually lasts. I let it unfold while another part of me is already tracking its trajectory, already anticipating the slow, almost imperceptible shift that never announces itself but always arrives.

I send screenshots to my friends like evidence.

“Look! Look at this, look at how normal this is, look at how I’m not imagining it.”

And they respond like it’s simple, like it’s safe, like this is already something that exists in a stable category that I don’t need to interrogate.

And I nod along like I agree, like I’m not already splitting myself in two.

One version of me is fully inside it. That version is easy. It’s real, too. She looks forward to seeing you. She doesn’t reread messages for tone or timing or implication. She sits on your lap without narrating it, lets your hands on her thighs mean exactly what they mean without translating them into something later.

It would be so easy to just be that version of her. To stay there, to be the girl on your lap laughing into your mouth and not thinking about anything except how your hands feel and how close you are and how natural it is to remain right there.

And sometimes, for a moment, I am.

But even then, something in me shifts. Not enough to ruin it, not enough for you to notice, but just enough to register it. Just enough to think: I am going to miss this.

Because that’s the other thing I do. I collect it.

I don’t decide to. It just happens. I notice the way you look at me and hold onto it a second longer than necessary. I notice the way you listen, the steadiness of your attention, the exact tone of your voice when you say my name. I press it into memory while it’s still happening, like I’m trying to preserve it before it has the chance to change.

Not out of panic. Not even out of fear.

Just out of a quiet understanding that I’m going to want this later.

That I’ll sit somewhere in the future and try to reconstruct the exact texture of this moment. I’ll try to remember how it felt while it was still happening, and I won’t be able to unless I start paying attention now.

So I do. I pay attention while I’m in it. I live it and store it at the same time. I am here, and I am already remembering being here.

You’re looking at me like I matter, and I’m already wondering what it will feel like when that stops being true.

I don’t even think you’re lying. I think you mean it, right now, in this exact configuration of time and feeling. Which almost makes it harder, because there’s nothing to push against. No obvious flaw, no clear instability, no reason to step away without becoming the person who ruins something good before it has the chance to exist.

If anyone else saw us, they’d say this is easy. They’d say this is what it’s supposed to look like when two people like each other at the same time. You reach for me without hesitation. I lean into you like it’s natural. There’s no friction, no confusion, no sense that anyone is holding back. Just this quiet, mutual gravity.

And yet, I am aware of it as something that might not last.

Not in a way that pulls me out of it, but in a way that softens everything slightly, like I’m holding it carefully because I know I’ll want to remember it. Because I know what it feels like to be the one still standing there after something quietly shifts.

I’ve been wrong before. I remember what that did to me. How long it took to stop replaying it, how long I kept checking for a version of it that would come back, how much smaller I made myself just to stop feeling like I was waiting for something that had already left.

I don’t want to do that again.

But I don’t want to miss this either.

So I stay.

I stay and let it be good. I stay and let myself smile at my phone. I stay and collect it, gently, not because I’m trying to survive it, but because it’s worth remembering.

Because even if this becomes something I miss, it is also something I had. Something real. Something easy. Something that, for a moment, didn’t ask me to be anything except here.

So yes, I’m smiling at my phone again.

Like I don’t already know what I do when things feel like this.

But I’m not leaving it early this time. I’m not naming it into an ending just to feel in control of it.

I’m just here, caught in the simplest version of it: you, still here. Me, still here. Nothing broken yet. Nothing gone yet.

Because that’s the only truth I actually have access to.

Not what it becomes.

Just what it is, while it is.

So I let myself have that.

I smile at my phone again.

And I don’t look away.

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I am good at loving. A pro, even. I can study a person’s silences and translate them, memorize the cadence of their footsteps in the hallway, anticipate needs before they are spoken. I know how to build a life out of small, ordinary rituals until it feels less like effort and more like gravity. I can love fully, fiercely, without hesitation. And I have. I have done it willingly, because I know how rare it is to find someone worth surrendering to. And once I’ve surrendered, I know how to stay.

There was a time when that love had a toothbrush.

Not metaphorical, not poetic, just practical. It sat in a cup next to mine, slightly worn, bristles splayed in a way that made it unmistakably not mine. It arrived casually, almost as an afterthought, and then it stayed long enough that its presence stopped being noticed. That is how love embeds itself, I think. not in grand gestures, but in repetition. In the quiet accumulation of shared space. In the moment something shifts from temporary to assumed.

The toothbrush meant someone was coming back. It meant tomorrow was not a question. It meant my life was no longer entirely my own, and somehow, at the time, that felt like relief.

After the end of my last relationship, I made a quiet vow. I would be single on purpose. Not bitter, not hardened, not recovering in the way people expect, but intentionally untethered. I wanted to explore, to flirt, to remember who I was without someone else’s toothbrush leaning toward mine.

And to my credit, I did exactly that.

I was open, warm, honest. I did not shrink myself to be more palatable. I did not soften my intensity to make someone else comfortable. If someone was put off by the fullness of who I am, I let them be. If I sensed I would have to shape-shift to be chosen, I walked away. I have already done enough disappearing in the name of love. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being loved only in the versions of yourself that are easiest to hold, and I have no interest in returning to it.

I learned, in a very real way, that having fun is fun. I moved through the dating landscape lightly, deliberately, like someone wading through shallow water. I could always feel the bottom beneath my feet. I never had to trust anything I couldn’t see. I met people in bars, in clubs, on glowing screens. I let them buy me drinks, let them kiss me goodnight, let them know me in fragments. I told the truth about myself, but only in ways that didn’t tether me to anything beyond the moment.

There is something incredibly seductive about shallow water. You can always feel the bottom. You can stand whenever you want. You can see the shore. You do not have to trust anything you cannot see.

And in that kind of water, no one leaves a toothbrush behind.

Or if they do, it doesn’t last long. It gets rinsed away with the tide of whatever comes next.

I built a life there. Curated, controlled, intentionally light. And for a while, it felt like freedom. It felt like I had outgrown the need for anything heavier, anything riskier, anything that required me to surrender control.

But freedom has a way of echoing.

And lately, I have been thinking about the toothbrush again.

Not even the person it belonged to. Just the fact of it. The quiet, unremarkable proof that someone had stayed long enough to need a place in my morning. That someone had stood next to me, half-awake, brushing their teeth, not performing, not trying, just existing beside me in a way that assumed tomorrow.

I miss that more than I am willing to admit.

And I hate that I miss it.

Because I also remember what came with it.

The way closeness can slowly tighten. The way “us” can start to swallow “me” if you’re not paying attention. The way love, if you’re not careful, can turn into something you have to maintain instead of something you get to feel. I remember how easy it was to lose myself inside of it, how natural it felt to prioritize someone else until I could barely hear my own voice anymore.

I will not go back to that.

So now I live here, in this strange, suspended place.

Where I want things I don’t trust.

I am thinking about the toothbrush again, and it feels inconvenient. It interrupts the narrative I have built about myself, the one where I am untethered and expansive and entirely fulfilled by a life that belongs only to me.

Because the toothbrush does not represent excitement or novelty. It represents something far less dramatic and far more difficult to admit that I want.

It represents staying.

And staying requires depth.

It requires stepping out of shallow water and into something where I cannot always feel the bottom, where I cannot always see the shore, where I cannot leave without consequence. It requires trusting something I cannot fully control. It requires letting someone close enough that their presence begins to alter the shape of my life again.

That is where the fear lives.

Because I know what it feels like to go under. I know how easily love can blur the edges of who I am. I know how natural it can feel to prioritize another person until my own needs become background noise. That is not a version of myself I am willing to return to.

So I stay where it is shallow.

I date. I connect. I leave. I am left. I keep my life streamlined, my attachments light, my sink empty. I tell myself this is strength. That this is what it means to have learned something from the past.

And yet, I cannot ignore the other truth running alongside it.

That shallow water, for all its safety, cannot hold anything.

Nothing grows there. Nothing lingers. Nothing stays long enough to become part of you. It is movement without accumulation. Connection without continuity. A life made up of moments that never quite touch each other.

I want connection, and I crave solitude. I want tenderness, and I fear the cost. I want to be known in the quiet, unremarkable ways that only time allows, and I want to remain entirely my own. I want to fall asleep next to someone, and I want to wake up alone.

I want the toothbrush.

I want the empty sink.

And I don’t know how to have both.

Because wanting the toothbrush means accepting what comes with it: the loss of control, the risk of absence, the possibility that one day it will no longer be there. That the space it occupied will feel louder than it ever did when it was filled.

I am not afraid of loving. I know how to do that.

What I am afraid of is staying long enough for it to matter again.

Still, despite everything, despite the safety of shallow water and the careful life I have built within it, I find myself returning to the same quiet image.

A sink. Two toothbrushes. No ceremony, no significance assigned to it in the moment. Just the unspoken understanding that someone is there, and will be there again.

I am thinking about the toothbrush again, which must mean something I am not ready to say out loud.

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My first instinct was to flinch. To correct them immediately. To soften it into something more acceptable—social, spontaneous, just “out more” lately. I didn’t want the phrase to stick to me. I didn’t want it to mean anything about who I am. Which is funny, because it did stick. It just took me a second to stop pretending it didn’t.

But that reaction felt old. Like muscle memory from a version of me who thought being perceived the wrong way could undo everything.

And lately, I’ve been trying very hard not to lie—especially not to myself. So I’ll say it plainly: I do like to party.

Not in the curated way. Not in the “two drinks and home by midnight” way that feels controlled and clean. I mean I lose time. I mean I forget to check my phone for hours and don’t even notice. I mean I walk into a new place and feel my body relax before my mind has decided whether I’m allowed to.

The bass hits before you’re even fully inside. It’s already in your chest by the time the door closes behind you. The floor is sticky, the air is too warm, and everyone looks slightly undone in a similar way. There’s always a moment where I think I should leave, and then I don’t.

Someone grabs my wrist and pulls me deeper into the crowd. Sometimes I know them, sometimes I don’t. I go anyway.

The lights strobe and everything becomes this loop of disappearance and return. A girl digging through her pockets like she’s lost something she can’t afford to lose. Someone laughing like they’ve known the person next to them forever. A couple making out right behind you like no one else exists in the room. A drink spilling and no one reacting. And me, dancing. Not well, not carefully, just fully, like there’s no version of me being observed from the outside.

Sweat at the back of my neck. Hair sticking to my face. Arms up because it feels better than having them down. Sometimes I close my eyes and there’s this brief moment where I disappear inside my own body, like I’m not being watched even by myself.

No one is looking at you the way you think they are. Everyone is too busy trying to be seen, or felt, or chosen.

I’ve stood in bathroom lines at 2 a.m. with girls who tell me their entire lives in five minutes and then vanish back into the night. I’ve held someone’s vape while she cried about a boy I will never meet. I’ve had strangers tell me I’m beautiful with a kind of urgency that feels almost desperate, like they need me to believe it more than they need it to be true.

And I do believe them, in the moment. It’s real in a way that doesn’t survive outside the room.

Outside, everything shifts immediately. Cold air, sudden quiet, heels on concrete. People asking where you’re going next like the night is something you can extend if you just do it right.

Sometimes I know where I’m going. Most times I don’t. Sometimes it’s another bar, or someone’s apartment, or nowhere at all. Sometimes I end up standing outside for too long, still half inside the night, trying to decide if I want to keep going or disappear into home.

Sometimes I’m in the backseat of a car at 5 a.m., forehead against the window, watching the city smear into light trails. My phone open to friends texting me they’re home safe, and recording voice memos to my best friends about my night. Music plays too softly for how loud everything felt just minutes ago. That’s usually when it hits me—how different this is from the life I used to have.

Because I did have a life that didn’t allow this kind of fun.

I had a partner, a routine, a future that could be explained without hesitation. I knew where I would be most nights, and it was almost always home. I was stable. I was good. I was the kind of person people thought of at when they talked about having things figured out. And I was suffocating.

It feels incredibly dramatic to say, but I had built a life I could function inside of, but not actually breathe in.

So I started moving differently.

I say yes when I probably shouldn’t. I follow people I just met. I stay out longer than I planned. I let nights become longer than they need to be, and I let them not mean anything afterward. And I know how it sounds when I say it like that, like it explains itself.

Party girl. Like that’s the category.

Like it means I’m avoiding something, or running, or not thinking hard enough.

And maybe I am, sometimes. I don’t know. I think about that more than I admit.

But I’m not numb. That’s the part people assume that isn’t true.

I feel everything too much.

I feel it when the bass hits and my body goes quiet in a way that feels like relief. I feel it when someone looks at me across a room and there’s that flicker of recognition, or want, or curiosity, and then it disappears just as quickly. I feel it when I’m laughing so hard I forget, briefly, who I used to be trying to become.

And I feel it later, too.

In the mirror I take off my makeup, wash away the glitter, and watch myself return. In my apartment when everything is suddenly too still. In that in-between moment where I can’t tell if I feel free or just untethered.

There is grief here, but it doesn’t announce itself. It’s not heartbreak. It’s not one clean story. It’s something stranger than that—how nothing is meant to last, how everything is temporary by design, how I keep learning how to be close to people without expecting them to stay.

Still, I don’t think I’m running. I think I’m choosing.

Even when I don’t fully understand what I’m choosing. Even when it contradicts the version of me I used to be proud of. Even when it makes no sense outside of the night itself.

Maybe I am a party girl.

But not in the derogatory way people mean it. Not careless. Not empty. Not lost.

Just in motion. I’m having fun.

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If I couldn’t be effortlessly lovable, I decided I would be exceptional.

I would be the kind of person people admire. I would be kind. Interesting. Smart. I would collect gold stars like they were little pieces of evidence—small, glittering proofs I could hold up and say: “Here. This is why I am worth something.”

Because somewhere along the way, simply breathing stopped feeling like enough. I needed proof.

I think I learned how to earn love before I ever learned how to feel joy.

As a child, I watched everything. Faces, tones, pauses—the almost invisible shifts that signaled approval or disappointment. I learned how fragile warmth could be, how quickly it could disappear. So I studied it. I memorized what made people soften, what made them stay, what made them proud. I became fluent in the language of being acceptable.

And then I became it.

I became good.

Good meant quiet. Good meant easy. Good meant not spilling your heart onto the floor where someone might have to step over it. Good meant solving your own problems before they became anyone else’s. Good meant being the relief in the room, the version of yourself that made everything smoother, less complicated, easier to hold.

And I was rewarded for it. Not always loudly, but consistently. A nod. A softened tone. A subtle confirmation that I was doing it right. That I was, at least for now, enough. Gold stars you couldn’t always see, but could feel accumulating somewhere in the background of my life.

But there was another version of me.

She danced on tables to pop songs playing through a purple iPod shuffle. She kissed girls under beds and held hands with boys under desks. She loved her friends like they were tiny burning stars. She felt everything in excess—joy, shame, longing, excitement—without asking permission, without calculating cost.

She did not need proof.

And slowly, quietly, I learned how to silence her.

Because she was unpredictable. Too much. She didn’t fit inside the version of me that earned love reliably. She risked things. Being seen, being messy, being uncontained. She didn’t collect gold stars. She risked losing them.

So I chose safety.

I became exceptional.

On paper, in rooms, in conversations—I knew how to land. Degrees on the wall. Money in the bank. A life that made sense from the outside and held together under scrutiny. I became competent in a way that made people trust me, impressive in a way that made them admire me. I learned how to endure boredom, loneliness, disappointment without letting it spill over and disrupt the structure I had built.

I became strong.

But my strength was rigid. It lived in clenched jaws and tight shoulders. It was the quiet habit of swallowing desire before it could fully form. It was optimization over aliveness. Survival over sensation.

Because when your worth depends on being good, the work is never finished. There is always another version of yourself to refine, another standard to meet, another invisible threshold to cross before you can finally relax into being enough.

So I kept collecting.

Proof. Achievements. Approval. Moments of being seen just enough to keep going. I built a life out of evidence. I built a self out of performance.

And still, something underneath it all never settled.

Because proof is fragile. It expires. It needs to be renewed. And without it—without the next confirmation that I was still acceptable—I didn’t quite know who I was.

Then, one day, quietly, almost annoyingly, the question arrived:

Is this it?

Is this what all of that effort was for? A life that works, but doesn’t feel like mine?

And beneath that question, something else began to surface.

Wanting.

Not the kind that can be explained or justified. Not the kind that optimizes outcomes or secures stability. But the kind I had trained myself out of. The kind that belonged to her.

The girl I thought I had outgrown.

She never asked how to stay good. She only ever asked: does this make me feel alive?

And for the first time, I let her answer.

I let myself read books that made my chest ache. I wrote things I would never show anyone. I picked up my guitar and played until my fingers hurt. I went out into rooms that were too loud, too warm, too alive, and let myself move without choreography. I wandered without a plan. I said yes without immediately calculating what it meant.

I stopped asking what I could prove.

And started asking what I could feel.

The shift wasn’t clean. The version of me that learned how to be good didn’t disappear. She is still here—still scanning, still cautious, still reaching for control when things feel uncertain. She still believes, sometimes, that love is something you earn by getting it right.

But she is no longer alone.

Because the other girl—the one I tried to silence—never actually left.

She was waiting.

Waiting for space. Waiting for permission. Waiting for me to stop treating her like a liability and start recognizing her as something else entirely.

She is not reckless.

She is honest.

She knows something I spent years trying not to need to know: that joy is not something you earn, and love is not something you prove your way into. That being alive does not require evidence. That worth is not a conclusion you arrive at after sufficient achievement.

And yet, I still feel the pull of the old equation:

If I am exceptional, I will be safe.
If I am impressive, I will be chosen.
If I have enough proof, I will finally be enough.

But now, there is something louder pushing back.

A life that cannot be reduced to evidence.
A self that cannot be fully measured.
A growing understanding that maybe I was never meant to earn my place in the world at all.

Maybe I was meant to inhabit it.

So yes, I am still interesting. Still sharp. Still, at times, the kind of person people admire.

But I am also messy. Unproven. Wanting. Alive in ways that do not translate into gold stars.

And for the first time, those things are not in conflict.

They are allowed to coexist. Because I am no longer trying to be exceptional in place of being lovable. I am learning, slowly, to stop treating my life like something that needs to be justified.

I thought I had to be good to be worth something.

I was wrong.

There was never anything to earn in the first place.

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I keep waiting for something to go wrong.

You don’t notice it happening at first. There’s no clear moment where everything changes. It’s quieter than that. It lives in the back of my mind, like a low hum I can’t turn off. The sense that this—this stretch of ease, of lightness, of feeling like myself—is temporary. Borrowed. On the verge of being taken back.

Because my life has been good. Not performatively good, not the kind you curate or explain, but actually, quietly, undeniably good. For ten months now, I have been living inside something I used to think only happened to other people. I laugh easily. I move through my days without that constant undertow of self-doubt. I feel present in my own life instead of hovering just outside of it, analyzing, bracing, waiting.

I am the best version of myself I have ever been. Not perfect, not fixed, but aligned. I recognize myself in the way I speak, in the way I show up, in the way I choose. There is a steadiness to me that used to feel impossible. I am not performing a version of who I think I should be. I am just… here.

And that is exactly what scares me.

Because I know what it feels like to lose things. Not always in obvious ways. Sometimes in slow, quiet erosions. Losing interest, losing hope, losing yourself piece by piece until you wake up one day and realize you don’t recognize the person you’ve become.

I lost my taste for life once. For people. For myself.

So now that it’s back, now that I wake up and things feel possible, now that I am building a life that feels like mine—I can’t help but anticipate the loss of it.

“Oh this is nice,” I’ll think, “this is going to hurt later.”

Like I can feel the ending while I’m still inside the beginning. Like I’m trying to emotionally outrun something that hasn’t even started chasing me.

This is anticipatory grief, I think. Mourning something before it’s even gone. Standing in the middle of joy and already grieving its absence.

And the worst part is nothing is even happening.

There’s no sign. No crack in the walls. No ominous music swelling underneath my life. Just me, standing in a perfectly fine moment, deciding it must be suspicious. Which is kind of insulting to the moment.

It doesn’t even make logical sense. Nothing is actively wrong. There’s no clear threat, no looming disaster. And yet the feeling persists. That this is fragile. That I am one wrong move, one bad decision, one shift in circumstance away from losing everything I’ve built.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t get here the way I thought I would.

If you had asked me at twenty-five where I’d be, I would have given you something cleaner. More structured. A version of success that made immediate sense. I would have told you a story with clear milestones, clear direction, clear proof that I was doing it right.

This isn’t that.

My life now doesn’t follow the plan I once held so tightly. It’s messier. Less linear. It doesn’t always translate easily when I try to explain it. And yet, I love it. That’s the part that surprises me the most.

I love the person I am when no one is watching.

There’s something almost disorienting about that, like I’m still catching up to myself. Like I should be preparing for the catch, the correction, the part where it all reverts to something more familiar.

Because I don’t think my brain knows what to do with a life that isn’t slightly collapsing.

So it starts inventing collapse. Subtle ones. Future ones. Emotional ones I can rehearse in advance so I’m not surprised later.

And because I’m apparently very efficient, I try to get ahead of it.

I’ll be in the middle of something good and there’s this moment. One so quick I almost miss it, where I step slightly outside of it.

Already thinking, this is the part you’ll miss.

Already turning it into memory while it’s still happening.

Already pulling away from a life that is still actively unfolding.

It’s almost impressive, in a sad way. Like I trust a future disaster more than the present moment.

It also steals something.

It takes a life that is, objectively, quietly, almost suspiciously good, and turns it into something I experience at a distance. Like I don’t trust myself to have it without immediately imagining the version where I don’t.

Which is strange, because this didn’t happen by accident. I didn’t stumble into it. I made choices to get here. Uncomfortable ones. Slightly disorienting ones. The kind that don’t look like success until much later, if at all.

And still, I love it more than anything I thought I was supposed to want.

But I think that’s why I keep waiting for the catch.

Because I don’t think my brain knows what to do with a life that isn’t slightly collapsing.

So it keeps reaching for one.

Not because it’s true.

Because it’s familiar.

And familiarity, unfortunately, can feel a lot like truth when you’re not paying close attention.

So I catch myself now, sometimes. Mid-step. Mid-narration. Mid-exit.

And I try, just briefly, not to follow it out of the room.

Just briefly to stay.

In the laugh. In the quiet. In the unremarkable fact of a life that is, right now, actually okay.

Then maybe that’s the work. Not fixing it. Not silencing it completely. Just refusing to obey it every time it calls me out of my own life.

Because the truth is, nothing is ending.

Not right now.

There is no hidden collapse waiting for its cue. No inevitable reversal already written into the script. There is just this moment. Intact, unthreatened, asking nothing of me except that I stay inside it.

And maybe I won’t always be able to. Maybe there will still be days where I step outside of my own life and start narrating its disappearance before it’s even begun.

But I’m starting to see that for what it is.

Not intuition. Not foresight. Not some quiet wisdom trying to prepare me.

Just a habit.

Just a reflex built in a version of my life where things did fall apart.

But I am not there anymore.

And this; this quiet, steady, undeservedly good stretch of being alive, is not something I need to earn by anticipating its loss.

It’s something I am allowed to have while it’s here.

Fully. Without rehearsal. Without softening it in advance.

So when the thought comes—this is going to hurt later—I’m trying to answer it differently now.

Maybe it will.

But that’s not what this is.

This is good.

And it’s happening.

And for once, I let it be good without asking how it ends.

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Which might sound cynical, or even a little sad. For a long time, I thought it would be.

But it isn’t.

If anything, it’s the first time dating has actually felt good.

Because there is a particular kind of thrill that only exists between two strangers sitting across from each other.

The kind where neither of you knows yet if the night will become a story you tell your friends, a memory that lingers for months, or something you’ll forget by morning. There’s a quiet, humming electricity in that moment—the possibility of connection, of chemistry, of nothing at all.

For every experience that made me feel foolish, there has been another that made me feel incandescent.

Nights when I left the bar with my cheeks aching from laughing. Walks home through the city where everything felt cinematic, like I had slipped into a private movie where the streets were glowing and I was the only one who knew the plot.

I have danced with strangers who felt like soulmates for exactly four songs. I have kissed people in the middle of the street like we had invented the concept of kissing. I have biked across bridges with music blasting in my ears on the way to meet someone I barely knew, my heart racing with the reckless optimism that maybe the night would turn into something unforgettable.

For a while, I was on all the dating apps. Or at least it felt like it. I would swipe while brushing my teeth, while waiting for the train, while lying in bed at night. Faces and fragments of lives spinning past me like a slot machine.

If I’m being honest, I never really knew what I was looking for. I still don’t, exactly.

But I understand now that I wasn’t necessarily looking for someone.

I was looking for a feeling.

In the middle of my twenty-fourth year, I found myself single for the first time as an adult. After years of being in a relationship, the world suddenly felt wide open in a way that was both exciting and unfamiliar. I was dating again without a map for what it was supposed to look like.

So I started going on dates.

And then I kept going on them.

I made a quiet deal with myself: I would stop when it stopped feeling good.

I haven’t stopped yet.

To be transparent, I like dating. I like the ritual of it: the getting ready, the music playing in the background, the quiet anticipation of not knowing how the night will unfold. I like texting my friends a picture, or sometimes a screen recording, of the person I’m about to meet.

I like the possibility of it. The feeling that anything could happen, and that I get to decide what I want to do with it.

I love a first date.

There’s something disarming about sitting across from someone you’ve never met before, a drink between you, both of you trying to understand who the other person is in real time.

Drinks are perfect for it. They offer an easy exit if the connection isn’t there. And if it is, they quietly open the door for the night to stretch into something else.

Sometimes the shift is subtle. You’re halfway through the second drink. The bar is loud, but the space between you feels strangely calm. Their knee brushes yours under the table and neither of you moves away. Someone laughs at something that wasn’t even that funny.

And suddenly, the night is about to tip in one direction or another.

Another drink. A game of pool. A walk somewhere.

The slow shift from strangers to something slightly more charged.

There is a moment on some dates where the conversation stops mattering. When you’re sitting too close in the booth, and both of you know it. When the air changes in that quiet, unmistakable way.

Sometimes you leave together.

Sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes it’s a kiss outside the bar that makes your whole body light up. Sometimes it’s an Uber ride across the city with someone’s hand tracing your collarbone like you’ve known them longer than a few hours.

And sometimes, it’s nothing more than a hug goodbye—and the strange realization that two lives briefly intersected and will never touch again.

I like dating. It’s true.

I like being open. I like being myself unapologetically. And it’s really wonderful when someone likes it.

It’s even more clarifying when someone doesn’t.

Recently, I came across a quote that stayed with me:

“Are you a freak?”
“No, I’m actually disgusted by the things I’ve done to feel loved.”

I sat with that for a while.

I sat with it for a while, wondering if I felt the same way. If I should feel ashamed of the ways strangers have briefly occupied my mind, my time, my body. If the dates, the almosts, the fleeting intimacies were something I should look back on with embarrassment.

But the truth is, I don’t feel disgust.

What I remember more than anything else is the good.

The strange, fleeting overlap of two lives. The quiet miracle of meeting someone you have never known before and realizing, within minutes, that they carry an entire world inside them; their childhood, their heartbreaks, the music they love, the small habits that make up their life.

And for a few hours, that world opens to you.

What I’ve learned, slowly, over the past few months, is that dating feels entirely different when you stop abandoning yourself inside of it.

When you allow yourself to enjoy it. To be curious. To meet people without needing them to become anything more than what they are. To let a night be just a night.

To flirt, to laugh, to feel desired—and to desire.

To follow the feeling when it’s there, and walk away when it’s not.

For a long time, I believed the goal was to find the right person and hold on tightly. That love meant permanence: that once you found someone, the story was supposed to lock into place and stretch forward forever.

But somewhere along the way, I started to understand the value of impermanence.

Travel romances. Mismatched connections. People you love who don’t love you back. People who love you when you simply aren’t ready for it. People who pass through your life for a few weeks or a few months and still leave something behind—a new song, a new story, a new understanding of yourself.

And yes, sometimes I want love. Of course I do. I’m a human being with a pulse and a romantic imagination.

But there is something else I’ve discovered along the way.

I like my life.

I like the feeling of belonging completely to myself—the late nights, the spontaneous plans, the quiet thrill of realizing I can go anywhere, meet anyone, change my mind at any moment. I like walking home through the city with music in my ears and no one waiting up for me.

I like that my life is wide open.

For the first time, I’m not dating because I need someone to complete it.

I’m dating because I want to. Because I’m curious. Because I can let nights unfold, people enter, desires rise—and still come home to myself, whole.

Liking dating doesn’t mean I’m failing at finding love.

Sometimes it just means I’ve learned what it feels like to be fully alive, and I’m not willing to trade that for anything that doesn’t feel just as vivid.

So no, I’m not dating to find love anymore.

I’m dating to feel it. To explore it. To live it. To be free, and to see what happens, even for just a night.

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I remember everything. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, because remembering you is like running my hands over an open wound.

It started like fire. Bright, reckless, impossible to ignore. We collided with a force that left me dizzy, breathless, and almost reckless myself. There wasn’t space to think, only to react, to let the heat of it take over. Every look, every touch, felt like a test. I knew from the start it could either ignite everything or burn out before it mattered.

It burned.

And I kept returning.

That’s the part that lingers.

After the first ending, I kept finding you. Same rooms. Same beds. Same late nights that erased the boundaries I thought I had. Muscle memory overriding logic. My body remembering what my mind refused to acknowledge.

I remember when it stopped feeling like possibility and started feeling like pattern.

At first, your touch felt like a promise. Later, it felt like a trap. Familiar. Predictable. Intimate in a way that made me feel like a fool because I already knew the truth: there would never be more. I remember lying next to you months later and realizing the intensity was still there—but the direction was gone.

I remember how you made me feel powerful and powerless at the same time. You still wanted me. Sometimes. You still came back. Sometimes. My body still reacted like the first time. Every nerve alert. Every instinct ready to surrender. I would have done anything you wanted.

And I remember craving you so fiercely, just to know I was yours for another night. You took pieces of me without offering anything in return. The scraps I held onto burned with want. Desire became sharp and punishing, and I kept letting it cut.

Because wanting isn’t the same as choosing. And I knew it every time I let you in anyway.

I told myself it was casual. That I was detached. That I could handle it. That I didn’t need more.

But every time your name lit up my phone, a tiny flare of hope would ignite. Maybe this time it means something. Maybe this time you actually want me.

You didn’t.

When I left your house, I would feel numb. The warmth, the closeness, the intensity—it had been there, immediate, complete in the moment. I got what I wanted. And still, I wanted more. Something I could never claim. Something you never offered.

Repetition carved grooves.

You became familiar terrain. I knew the shape of you in the dark. You knew exactly how to pull me close, to hold just enough to keep me there. That familiarity made it harder to accept what I already knew: there was never anything more. There were only sparks that flared and faded before they could become something real.

I remember knowing I deserved clarity and choosing heat instead.

I remember the way it felt to be wanted so intensely, to have desire pressed into me, and still never be chosen. That contradiction sharpened me. Made me notice the difference between temporary attention and something that mattered. Between access and devotion. Between fleeting fire and real warmth.

I remember realizing the beginning wasn’t a lie. It was real—to me, at least. The problem was that we (me) tried to stretch a spark into something sustainable without changing its nature. It stayed a spark. Bright. Brief. Repeatable. But never steady.

I remember the last time I let you in and felt the pattern clearly. The intensity was still there, but my hope was quieter. Thinner. I realized continuing wasn’t romantic. It was avoidance. And I finally understood I didn’t need this anymore.

I remember everything.

Not just the heat.

The after.

The quiet.

The way I kept choosing you even when you weren’t choosing me in the same way. The way my body betrayed my mind. The way desire could punish me—and I let it.

I remember the weight of it all: craving someone I could never have, surrendering to what I knew would hurt, and being drawn back anyway.

For a long time, I thought I wanted to forget everything.

Now I think remembering is the point. I remember what it feels like to confuse chemistry for compatibility. I remember what it feels like to hope quietly, long after hope makes sense. I remember what it feels like to crave someone knowing they could never be mine.I remember what it feels like to surrender and resist at the same time.I remember what it feels like to let someone take pieces of me and still feel compelled to give more.

And I remember that eventually, I stepped out of the loop.

Not because the intensity died, but because I finally understood that the turmoil wasn’t worth it anymore.

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Sometimes I let myself imagine it.

Not the act. I don’t linger there. I imagine the aftermath the way you press on a bruise just to see if it still hurts.

If I had died at fourteen, the earth would have kept its rotation. That is the first truth. The sun would have risen with bureaucratic indifference. Morning traffic would have stalled on the highway. The garbage trucks would have made their groaning rounds. There is something obscene about how efficiently the world absorbs a vacancy.

But inside my house, gravity would have changed.

I see my mother first. I always do. I imagine the hospital room, fluorescent lights humming, the air too cold, the vinyl chair that no one wants to sit in but someone has to. I imagine the sentence landing. Your daughter. Past tense implied but not yet spoken.

There are griefs that make noise. And then there are the ones that are silent.

My mother would not have screamed. She would have folded. Her knees giving way not dramatically, but mechanically, as if a hinge had failed. I think of how she once counted my fingers and toes in the hospital when I was born, checking for wholeness. I think of those same hands being asked to touch my still face and confirm the opposite.

My father would have gone quiet in a different way. He would have straightened his back. Asked logistical questions. What time. What paperwork. Where do we sign. Men like him metabolize catastrophe through usefulness. He would have fixed things in the weeks after: the cabinet door that hung unevenly, the garage shelves, the loose stair rail, as if tightening screws could stabilize the universe.

They would have had to choose a casket.

I force myself to sit with that detail. My parents standing under soft showroom lighting while someone gestures toward wood finishes. Cherry. Oak. Something understated. As if taste still matters.

There would have been forms to complete. My name typed into boxes labeled “decedent.” A cause. A date. Official ink sealing what my fourteen-year-old brain had believed was private anguish. Pain translated into clerical language.

My bedroom would have become uninhabitable.

The air inside it holds the damp sweetness of leave-in conditioner and adolescence. A glass of water clouded by the print of my thumb. A sweatshirt slung over the desk chair. The bed unmade.

My mother would sit on the edge of it and press her face into my pillow and inhale as if she could pull me back through scent alone. My father would stand in the doorway, unable to cross the threshold, as if the room were radioactive.

And my dog.

He would scratch at my door until someone opened it. He would circle the room, confused by the absence of my body but not by the persistence of my smell. He would wait at 3:15 p.m., because that was the time I came home. Dogs measure love in patterns. I would have broken one he trusted.

At school, my locker would stay closed. Someone would tape construction-paper flowers to it. Teachers would clear their throats and use words like “tragedy” and “support services.” My friends would scroll through our messages searching for evidence: a clue, a goodbye, a sentence shaped like a warning.

They would not find one.

Because at fourteen, you can be suicidal and still send memes. You can want to vanish and still say “lol.” You can plan your own disappearance and still ask what’s on the math test.

The world would continue in ways that feel insulting in hindsight. There would be a spring dance. Standardized testing. A new season of the show we were watching. Someone else would sit in my seat by the window. The volume of everything would return to normal faster than my parents could bear.

I would calcify into anecdote.

She was so smart.
She was so sensitive.
She seemed fine.

Fourteen-year-old me believed she was performing an act of mercy. She thought she was containing contamination. She believed her sadness was a toxin and that removing herself was a form of sanitation.

What she did not understand is that pain does not disappear when you do.

It migrates.

It would have entered my mother’s bloodstream, lived there like a chronic illness. It would have bent my father’s spine a few degrees forward. It would have threaded itself into every holiday, every empty chair, every milestone I failed to reach. My absence would not have been relief. It would have been inheritance.

I remember the physicality of that year. It was not poetic. It was heat under the skin. It was lying on the bathroom floor with my cheek against cold tile and feeling the pulse in my face like something trying to escape. It was the conviction that the noise in my head was permanent, that I was structurally unsound.

At fourteen, the brain is still scaffolding and wet cement. I mistook volatility for destiny. I believed intensity meant forever.

I did not yet know that feelings can crest and recede. That bodies change allegiance. That the same thighs I despised would one day carry me into rooms I chose. That my body could be a place I lived in, not a problem I was assigned. That desire could exist without punishment attached.

I did not know my parents would one day look at me across a dinner table with something like relief.

Relief that I exist.

Because my staying altered their future. It gave them arguments about politics and complaints about work and phone calls about nothing. It gave them the banal, miraculous privilege of watching me age.

If I had died at fourteen, I would have been preserved in a kind of tragic amber. I would never have embarrassed myself. Never loved the wrong person. Never written something earnest and cringed at it later.

But I also would never have felt the joy of being chosen. Never known the particular warmth of someone reading my words and saying, “You’re good.” Never woken up on a random Tuesday and realized the heaviness had thinned enough for light to pass through.

Fourteen-year-old me thought finality was powerful.

What she did not understand is that survival is more violent.

Survival is not soft-focus resilience. It is animal. It is staying in a body you are not sure you want. It is letting your heart keep beating when you are angry at it for doing so. It is outliving the version of yourself that was convinced there was no after.

If I had died at fourteen, my story would have ended in a small, airless room.

Instead, it ruptured open.

It became messy and sensual and inconvenient. It filled itself with rent payments and packed calendars and sex and ambition and heartbreak and ordinary mornings where I brush my teeth and think about nothing at all.

Nothing at all.

That is the part that sits with me now: that I once believed nothingness was the only relief, when in fact the ability to have an unremarkable Tuesday is a luxury I almost forfeited.

When I think about that furious, overwhelmed fourteen-year-old girl, I see how close the world came to losing an entire future it didn’t even know it needed. She believed she was a problem; she did not understand she was potential. She could not see the kitchens she would stand in, the rent she would complain about, the bodies she would love, the arguments, the laughter, the unbearable ordinariness of being alive. She thought ending it would contain the pain. She did not know it would only redistribute it. So instead, whether out of fear or exhaustion or something like instinct — she did the smallest, most radical thing available to her. She remained. She let her heart keep its rhythm. She let morning arrive.

She chose, without knowing it, every ordinary day that followed.

And because she did, I am not a memory.

I’m still here.

Heyyyyyyyy… it’s me. Thank you for reading this very intimate essay. Let me be clear, this was a long time ago. I am very happy to be alive. If you’re struggling, please take care of yourself and reach out to someone you trust. You are not alone, I promise.

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Before the unraveling, she was noise.

At my childhood softball games, you could hear her before you saw her. She screamed my name from the bleachers as if the game depended on me. Not polite clapping. Not careful encouragement. Full-throated claim.

“RUN, BABY!”
“THAT’S MY SUNSHINE!”

Parents turned. I used to feel my cheeks burn, embarrassed by how visible her love was. But beneath the embarrassment was something validating. The knowledge that someone in this world believed I was worth yelling for.

She believed in me with unreasonable confidence. I was, objectively, an average softball player. But from her perspective, I was carrying the team.

At her house, she let me drink French vanilla Coffee-Mate out of tiny pink plastic tea cups. She poured it slowly, carefully, like it was rare and expensive. I would sit on her countertop with my feet swinging above the linoleum and sip straight creamer like it was tea at a hotel. Too sweet. Artificial. Perfect. It felt like being let in on something.

Growing up, my friends had living, sentient grandparents. I only had one. And she was probably the equivalent of eight people. She was concrete. She showed up. She smelled like perfume and powder and something floral. Her favorite flowers were gardenias. Gardenias are not background flowers. They insist on being noticed.

So did she.

If you had met her before the illness, you would not have predicted a slow unraveling. She was not built for subtle exits. She spoke loudly, not because she lacked awareness, but because she believed in occupying space. Her opinions were not softened to preserve comfort. She said what she thought. If she loved you, she told you. If she was disappointed, you felt it immediately. There was nothing diluted about her presence.

Before she began to disappear, she danced.

Not delicately. Not in a way that asked for permission. She danced like someone who believed her body was a declaration. At parties, in kitchens, in living rooms, she would lift her arms and let her hips argue with gravity. Even when her balance gave way. Even when her son, my father, would shake his head and say, “Ma, enough.” She would wave him off and continue. There was music in her whether or not there was music playing.

Strong-willed is a polite phrase for someone who refuses erasure. She did not shrink to make others comfortable. She did not apologize for the space she occupied. Her love was equally loud. She would cup my face in both hands and look at me as if I were a headline. As if I were breaking news. “You are my sunshine,” she’d say, and it sounded like ownership but felt like shelter.

Dementia is too soft a word for what it does. It sounds like a fog. Something atmospheric, maybe romantic. It is not. It is an unraveling.

At first, it was small things. A story told twice. Then three times. A suspicion that someone had moved her purse when it had not moved at all. A sentence that wandered off before it reached its point. We corrected her gently. We laughed it off. We said, “It happens.” We said, “She’s getting older.”

But my grandmother had never been someone things merely happened to. She happened to them.

As the years went on, she began to lose not things, but the world around her. The places she had commanded for decades became unfamiliar terrain. Names slipped away, faces blurred, and even familiar feelings felt strange. She would stand in a room, looking around quietly, as if trying to orient herself in a space that no longer made sense to her.

There is a particular cruelty in watching a strong woman negotiate confusion. She did not become soft. She became frightened. The loudness remained, but it turned inward, echoing. She would argue with realities no one else could see. She would insist on events that had not occurred. Her truth, once sharp and grounded, untethered itself from the world we shared.

For five years, she died in increments.

Each visit required a recalibration. What would she remember today? Would she know my name? Would she still recognize her son? Sometimes she did. Sometimes there was a flicker in her eyes when I leaned close and said who I was. Sometimes there was nothing but distance.

In the final years, she sat in a wheelchair by a window that did not offer much of a view. She cried often. Not dramatic sobs. Just a steady leaking grief, as if her body understood what her mind could no longer articulate: that something essential had been taken.

The loud woman from the bleachers became a body by the window.

I used to leave those visits with a guilt that felt almost violent. I was relieved when I stepped back into the parking lot and the world made sense again. I was relieved to inhabit a brain that obeyed me. Then I would hate myself for the relief.

What does it mean to watch someone lose themselves while their body remains?

It feels like standing in a house after the furniture has been removed. The walls are there. The windows. The familiar layout. But the life inside it has thinned to an echo. You keep expecting the music to start again. You keep expecting her to lift her arms and command the room.

She never did.

I wanted to crawl inside her mind and turn the lights back on.

When she finally died, the grief was strangely muted. The larger loss had unfolded over years. The funeral felt like an acknowledgment of something that had already happened. The woman who had once filled rooms with her voice had been receding long before her body stopped. What undid me was remembering her before.

The volume. The dancing. The way she loved my father with a fierceness that felt holy. The way she loved me like I was an extension of her own pulse.

Dementia took her language, her coordination, her autonomy. What devastates me is not that she forgot words. It is that the woman who refused erasure was erased slowly, molecule by molecule, by something invisible.

I think about her often now when I consider what it means to be a person.

We spend our lives constructing a self. We polish it. We defend it. We insist on it. And then something invisible can come along and begin dismantling it piece by piece. Not because we were weak. Not because we failed. Just because bodies are temporary houses for electric things.

The self is not only cognition. It is not only memory.

It is also the imprint you leave in other bodies.

Sometimes, alone in my kitchen, I pour coffee and remember the taste of French vanilla creamer in a pink plastic cup. I remember her shouting my name across a field as if the world needed to know who I was.

When I dance in my kitchen, when no one is watching — I feel her. When I speak too loudly in defense of something I believe, I hear her rhythm in my voice. When I love fiercely and without dilution, I recognize the inheritance.

She may have lost herself for five years.

But she did not lose the fact that she had existed, powerfully and without apology.

Her voice, her laughter, her insistence on being seen — those things are not gone. They live in the way I move, the way I insist, the way I love. She taught me that presence is not quiet. It is insistence. It is claiming space and refusing erasure, even when the world tries to shrink you.

When I dance in my kitchen, when I raise my voice, when I love without hesitation, I am remembering her. She is alive in these echoes.

Life may take bodies, memory, even language, but it cannot touch the imprint we leave on others. She was loud in the room. And because of her, I will be too.

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When I was a child, the mirror was a stage.

I would drag a chair across the bathroom tile, climb onto the counter, and study myself like I was discovering a new species. My hair was unruly and unapologetic. My eyebrows were thick, bold parentheses framing my big, open eyes. I looked curious. Unafraid. Solid in my own skin. My arms were hairy, my legs strong and ready to run. I smiled at myself and meant it. I was pretty.

My parents would lift me up and turn me toward the glass as if to say, Look. There she is. And I would look. And I would believe them.

I was not evaluating. I was witnessing.

Somewhere along the way, that kind of looking became impossible. There was no single moment when it changed. No slammed door, no grand public humiliation, no bright red line dividing before from after. It was more subtle than that — more like a room slowly losing light at dusk. You don’t notice it happening until you realize you’re squinting. There were years where I was more sad than I’d ever been, and I couldn’t point to a single reason why. A low, constant ache. The kind that makes you search for a culprit.

The mirror volunteered.

It began softly. Your hair looks crazy. You should tame it. Remember when they called you gorilla at school? Short. Stocky. Too big. Look at your nose! You should get that fixed.

The mirror developed a voice, and it was fluent in cruelty.

I started leaning closer, tilting my head, squinting, pulling at skin as if I could reshape it by hand. The mirror was no longer a surface; it had become a courtroom. Every feature counted as evidence. Every flaw carried a sentence. And the strangest part was how faithfully I carried out its orders.

I confided in it. I returned to it multiple times a day. Turn to the side. Check every angle. I believed it told me the truth when no one else would. It offered solutions, too. Rhinoplasty. Breast augmentation. Liposuction. Just fix it. Just refine it. Just sand yourself down into something acceptable.

Maybe someone will love me if I look better.

Maybe I will love me if I look better.

That is the lie that sells everything.

It sells lotions and scalpels and injections. It sells hope in sterile packaging. It instructs you to suck in when the picture is taken, to tilt your chin just so, to always be aware of how you are being seen. It convinces you that peace is one correction away. It whispers that love is conditional and the condition is symmetry.

But the love that matters has never required a smaller nose.

The love that matters does not arrive because your waist shrinks or your lips swell. It arrives because you are alive in your body. Because you laugh from your diaphragm. Because your hands are warm when they hold someone else’s.

I spent years believing the mirror was a tool for improvement. If I stared long enough, I could identify the defect. If I identified the defect, I could correct it. If I corrected it, I would finally feel at peace.

But the mirror never fixed me because I was never broken. What it did was shrink my life to the size of my reflection.

I would leave the house already exhausted from fighting myself. I would enter rooms calculating angles. I would smile while wondering how my cheeks looked. I was living parallel to my own experience, never fully inside it.

All the while, the body I was scrutinizing was quietly carrying me through everything. It got me out of bed when sadness pressed down on my chest. It walked me into rooms I was afraid of. It hugged my friends. It pet my cat. It touched and loved being touched. It did not once ask to be redesigned.

Now, I look in the mirror far less. Not because I’ve mastered self-love in some triumphant way. But because I am tired of negotiating with glass.

I look the way I look.

I smile the way I smile.

I move the way I move.

There is no point in nitpicking every single thing about me anymore. It is miserable. It is constant. It is an ultramarathon with no finish line. You fix one thing and your brain invents another. There’s always going to be something else.

And the world does not pause for your self-surveillance.

The music keeps playing. Your friends keep laughing. Your cat keeps stretching in a warm beam of sunlight. Life is happening in three dimensions while you are trapped in two.

I think about my body differently now. Not as a project. Not as a problem. But as a house. It is the place where my thoughts flicker and my feelings swell. It is where grief lands and joy explodes. It is where desire wakes up hungry and unashamed. It is where comfort settles in after a long day.

This body hugs my friends. It carries groceries up the stairs. It moves freely on the dance floor. It presses into another body and feels the miracle of being wanted. It feels the miracle of wanting.

When I reduce it to a nose or a thigh or a measurement, I am shrinking a cathedral down to a crack in the paint.

I am not immune to old habits. I am not naïve. I still have moments. I still catch my reflection unexpectedly and feel that old tightening in my chest. I still hear the old refrain droning from the glass: fix it.

But the voice is quieter now.

Because I have more evidence than the mirror does.

I have memories of being held. Of being chosen. Of being looked at with softness. They say, “I love your nose, what are you talking about?” They say, “I love how you laugh.” They say, “I feel safe with you.” They say, “You feel like home.”

And home is not symmetrical. Home is not perfect.

Home is warm.

When I was a child, I looked in the mirror and saw a whole person. I didn’t edit her. I didn’t strategize her appeal. I just saw her.

I think growing up in this context is less about improving the reflection and more about returning to that first gaze — the one without commentary.

The one that says, There she is.

Stop looking in the mirror like it’s going to fix you.

It cannot grant you peace. It cannot assign you worth. It cannot measure the way your body carries love through the world.

Step away from it.

Go dance in the kitchen.

Go let someone touch your strong legs.

Go hug your friends with your hairy arms.

Go exist in three dimensions again.

You were never meant to be flattened into glass. You were meant to move.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. Be nice to yourself. You deserve it.

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