I like the way you’re clean shaven. I like that you weren’t when we met. I like that I didn’t ask. I like that your eyes are a Siberian blue; that Alberta means this will be explicitly finite.

I don’t know what I’m looking for anymore. I tell everyone that all I’m after is a forever, but if that were true I wouldn’t be chasing men whose only answer is never.

I fell in love once: slowly. Ridiculously. Obsessively.

Now I just fall in love always. Quick, surreptitiously, and with momentum.

The thing about love is that it’s all true because it all exists. People are perturbed at high-school, five-second love because they’ve never had it. People are constantly lusting for the passionate kind of love because they’ve always dreamed it. People are always looking for the grandeur. The star trail. Because they don’t want to look for the puck.

It seems like everyone forgets about the way you look when the sun just starts to rise. The way your skin feels so unbearably hot when it’s pressed against me–almost as if your bones want to force themselves out of your mouth and into mine.

It seems like everyone forgets about the way you have seven different laughs. How you touch, but don’t want to. The five seconds of thought that precedes the two seconds your hands always linger.

You ate the ramen I made you because you couldn’t not. You smile at my terrible jokes that stutter out because I can’t form thoughts and stare at your face at the same time. This will be over soon, and I don’t know whether or not you’ll ever find out that you’re beautiful in a way I’ve never had.

I fall in love with myself in the way people show me how. I fall in love with the girl that gets anxious in the moment before a plot drop. I fall in love with the girl that is so offended not to please. With the girl that made something from nothing, to prove a point. With the girl that exists when she wants to, because she was taught a lady always leaves before she is left.

It’s like playing telephone with your traits–hearing yourself reflected through someone else’s mind; feeling the softness of your skin under someone else’s fingertips. The warmth of your tongue radiating from someone else’s mouth. Your insides from another person’s body.

Loving yourself by yourself is a lonely thing; but everyone leaves pieces of themselves wherever they’ve been. We forget toothbrushes and jackets and chargers. We leave behind our hair, dead skin cells–fingerprints on hearts we’ve touched and minds we’ve shattered.

I once thought the point of my life was to give my all to one singular being. To be the virgin, the housewife, the mother, the supporter, the sexual deviant.

I didn’t realize I would never have a choice in the parts of me that people would take; the parts of me that I would eventually leave behind. I didn’t realize that the analogy doesn’t work because we’re less automobile parts and more infinite book pages. That the analogy doesn’t work because there is nothing of me that I could give and still not have.

And this is my second truth: I may never be able to change or alter someone else’s perception of me, but I will always be able to control the perception and thoughts I have of me.