It all starts like most stories do.

I was nervous, at first. Jittery. I didn’t want to look at you, because looking at you would make things real. My mind hadn’t yet comprehended that you were standing before me, wearing a lousy blue t-shirt and jeans. I didn’t think you recognized me, and I didn’t want to make any impression that I recognized you. It was a pride thing. We go on, following the music and the sunset, and the whole time I’m trying to pretend I’m more than what I am. I don’t know what it is. I wanted you to think I was different than before — more confident, maybe. You struck me as the kind of person who was quiet, but confident. I wanted to be that person too, at least just for the night.

I went on, trying to be someone I wasn’t to impress a boy I hadn’t seen in years, and I occupied myself with the sound of the band following us along. I would hear you behind me, laughing, but I was too scared to join in. It was part of my performance. I wanted to be mysterious. I wanted you to try and figure me out, the way I was trying to figure you out. You were a puzzle I was trying to piece together, and I wanted you to do the same with me. The thing with meeting someone again, after years, is that you have the chance to play a subtle cat-and-mouse game. How many things can you find out about me without me telling you? How many new things can you rediscover?

You were taller, lankier. Your voice was deeper; rough like the corrosion of a strong tide against rocks coated with salt. Your jokes weren’t necessarily funny, but you laughed hard enough for the chorus to join in and laugh with you anyway. The night went on and the sun set behind the dry mountains and we didn’t talk much that night. I was too scared to approach you — to close that distance and ask if you remembered me, and you, for whatever reason, didn’t make any effort to approach me either. I hadn’t yet known what the price of your attention would cost me, and I was grateful for it.

I wasn’t as confident in myself, and everything about me was juvenile innocent, and naive. You could see the immaturity on my face. I was young and hardly knew anything about the world. More importantly, I hardly knew anything about intimacy or the kind of connection that makes the nerves on your skin jump. I hadn’t felt the complexity of my emotions yet, because everything up until that point had been simple.

The very honest version of the story is that my life had run in a certain way before you, and after you arrived, the timeline of my life careened elsewhere. I collided into you, maybe too harshly, but the facts remain the facts. There is a life before you and there is a life after you.

I had spent many of my years complacent with the fact that you were a fast-moving object in my peripheral vision. I could see you, but you were always out of reach, a bit too far away, and a bit too quick for me to catch up. And then, there you were, barging into my life with ease; slotting into a space that somehow was always made for you.

We sat in the water one afternoon, shoulders touching under the sun, and we confessed that we didn’t know how to swim. I was knee-deep into a large hole in the center of the Earth, looking everywhere but at you, and we were laughing about jobs and school and the like. The nerves never dwindled, no matter how much I tried to calm them. Eventually, you wrapped a lanky arm around my shoulder and we stayed like that, for however long, and a storm developed in the center of my stomach. I felt it everywhere; in my shoulders, in my neck, in my hands. I was scared of the rhythm of my heart, now that it was beating so close to yours.

In reality, there are very few moments in my life that have made me feel alive and the first time I realized that I had only lived my life for a single moment had been in the fall. The world was too heavy to hold, the wind too cold to ignore, and I thought I’d never find a city better than the one I was in. You were light-stricken; glowing in the dark.

We laughed about everything — about how cold it was, how poor we were, and how passionate and crazy we were for thinking we could be the ones to achieve all our Big Dreams. But you weren’t scared like I was. You once told me that we’re the kind of people that figure things out.* *And then I was holding onto you and you were holding onto me and life felt a world away. We were drunk and holding each other up, keeping each other from tumbling.

You were so determined to keep me on my feet and to keep me from buckling under the pressure, and I was determined in the same way. It’s not prophetic. It doesn’t have to be declared. You just recognize there is a person out there who won’t let you ruin your life. There is a person out there who will push you when you feel like you can’t keep going, and who will, even if most gently, hold your grieving heart for a moment to keep you from coming undone.

But then summer stretched into sparse silence, into nothing.

Everything turns to dust anyway.

Over the course of two years, I’ve learned a lot. Most of it was because of you – your love and your absence altogether. I mean it when I say that in loving you, I met myself.

In February, I could hear life happening in another room, just behind a locked door. I was taking pictures of people I didn’t have to say goodbye to. I was holding candlelight in my hands and it never went out. I was optimistic about my future. Somewhere beyond the empty space I was in, there was a song I recognized without having to learn it. There was a thread and needle that didn’t puncture into me.

In April, I felt like one of those lava lamps that got too hot and then was suddenly unplugged. I had to hold my hands together to keep from crying at the bus stop. Everything is so bleak when you have no answers for anything. The world was grey, dark, and lonely. I couldn’t even hear the birds.

I had gone a very long time living my life playing dumb and it was finally catching up to me. Everything I lost that year was everything I had been too scared to hold anyway. You were one of them. There was always a feeling haunting me – an I-should’ve-held-you-while-I-had-you feeling that turned into guilt, into regret.

But you taught me the value of letting go. You taught me what a world in which your fears dominate you looks like. You taught me that there is you, and there is the world, and the only thing you can ever be sure of is who you are. Most importantly, you taught me how to look for myself. I failed myself too many times, but if I hadn’t gotten lost, I would’ve never become the girl I am now.

Every dream I have of you is the same. Life is endless, slow, and blue, and you come to me like a friend. There’s a door open somewhere. We haven’t been able to close it.

You’re someone I can’t recognize now, and I don’t know who you are, but I knew who you were then, and that matters to me. I will never be seventeen again, and madly in love with you, and so naive it made me blind. But we were kids together, and then we were teenagers, and that’s all I can think about. I don’t think I’ll find that same fervor again, but I’m trying.

In the bathroom, I play with the skin on my face and think about how even when I’m throwing my stomach out into the toilet bowl, I still take off my makeup. I think of how I have put my body through hell, sometimes for you, but I have also sat here and tried to stitch myself back up. I sit here and I tend to my wounds, and cure them, and dry them, and reopen them again.

Strangely, because of my upbringing, I never felt like much of a girl. But, in the crying over you, and growing into red lipstick and curly hair and shorter skirts, I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror and saw I was a young woman. What’s the difference between girlhood and womanhood? Hindsight.

I learned to be a girl. I was something holy, something sacred, something divine, ugly, rotten, and messy. Vanity and frailty entangle in my hands and fly up and outward. I point at different parts of my body – here are my hands, here is my pleasure, here is what entices me and what leaves me dry.

I have these crooked teeth and a startling laugh that I love. I love waking up in the morning and looking at my hands, thinking of my brain, and my dullness, and bareness, and loudness, and knowing that it’s all me, all mine. Mine mine mine. Of course, I try to make everything beautiful, that’s just because I am.

That summer we spent together is stuck in the back of my throat. Everything feels like the ending of something and the beginning all the same. I’m nineteen now. We haven’t spoken since June.

I wonder how you’re doing. Sometimes, I get glimpses of your life. It makes me sad that you changed so much, but then again, so did I. Maybe I ended up being right about us growing in parallel.

I ended up getting to know someone else. It didn’t end well. It was not a silence, like you and me, but a rupture. I thought that the world ended quietly, but it can very well end in chaos too. What I never said out loud is that your emotional torture was heartbreaking, but I did most of the work myself. I was the one who planted the screw in the center of my chest, you just finished tightening it into me.

But he was the person holding the knife now. He was the hammer, the collision, the fire that simmered slowly and then grew. You and him both had the same fire pooling underneath you, but you were more maelstrom; he was a wildfire. You once told me to be careful of boys like that. I told you, it’s fine. I know that some men come into your life with hammers. You never told me that some boys hide those hammers, though.

Even in the depth of my heartbreak, I kept wondering that if maybe things had ended differently, you’d be consoling me. In the moments when the world was hazy and blurry, you told me you loved me. You showed it to me before you said it – maybe that’s why you’re the only person I’ve ever believed meant it. I know you love me still. But you were always the better one at choosing yourself; at knowing your worth. You’re teaching me about that, still.

You’ve seen nearly every other phase of my life. I hope you can see this new one. I hope we can meet each other again when we’re more grown-up than we are now. I’ll hand you a shot glass and say, come on, for old time’s sake. And it’ll be just like the first time I saw you again. This time, I’ll say*, hey, do you remember me?* And you can pretend to be the mysterious one. We’ll play the cat and mouse game, and then, this time, I’ll have the courage to say, I think you’re the only person I’ve ever loved without regretting it.

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