I haven’t got a single reason to love you, if you don’t count the fact that I still want to believe you’re worth loving. You aren’t even worth liking. I find that it’s usually the “like” that stops before the “love”, because it’s the latter we can’t control. But you can’t hold on to what isn’t there. It isn’t hiding in some secret sea cave, it isn’t buried in the sands of myself. And when we spotted each other after all that time, arms folded, too close for comfort and yet not close at all, I knew. I spent a good portion of the last 6 months trying to salvage pieces from the shipwreck, but the pieces were never there in the first place. I thought there would be reasons because I tried to make reasons. I tried to find reason in his voice, calling and hanging up even through I knew you knew. “Hello? Is that you?” Goodbye, it’s me. Finding a shirt I could have gotten him was a reason. A familiar scent, an empty bed, an old Brando movie, these were all reasons. The reasons were like bandages, not wanting to take them off too slowly because it would hurt or too quickly because it would still hurt. So you don’t take them off at all.

Because this is what protects us—not accepting. It’s not that we don’t know, it’s that we don’t want to. We want the intimacy without the consequences, the romance without the torment, the beauty without the agony. We never want the whole truth. You want my whole truth? He’s never loved anybody, not even me. That summer when I was 16, that was the romance and the intimacy. The following months after that is the part I’m not supposed to write about, the hurt and the heartache, but in those months I found another whole truth—the heart that hasn’t ached isn’t a heart at all.