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It sings inside my body too.
Makes me want to ask what you would taste like, if I were to taste you.
God. God. I have to … just stop there.
6.25am
Damn, I forgot to respond to your question.
Though I think you know the answer anyway.
No, I’ve never been in love.
Have you, Malcolm?
10.59am
I got a legit shiver, when I first read your reply. A shiver I just had to sit inside all morning, waiting for a chance to sit down and respond properly.
I’ve long known that hearing my name in certain breathy, vigorous contexts is like sex kryptonite for me, but I never would have guessed that reading it in a text could do that.
TMI? It’s, like, lunchtime, so I can’t blame it on delirium or booze. Oh well. What’s sent is sent.
For a second, I thought how sad it is that you’ve never been in love. But then I thought harder about it, and in a way maybe it’s not. It means you still get to feel that for the first time.
Actually, after I asked you that question, I regretted it. I thought, what if she asks me the same? Because I’m not very proud of my answer, to be honest.
In short, I’ve been in love. I’ve been in love so many times I’m beginning to wonder, have I actually ever been in love?
I fall in love easily. I’m quick to toss those three little words around, like they’re singles instead of fifties. Or the old me was. He was way better at falling in love than actually maintaining a relationship, though.
In hindsight, I had a pattern: see a girl, interact with her briefly, then construct an elaborate, baseless, two-dimensional concept in my head of who she is and how dating her would so perfectly accessorize and complete my life.
Fast forward. By the three, four, five-month mark, everyone’s resentful and disappointed. Inevitably. The poor woman’s fallen short of my ill-informed and unrealistic expectations about who she is, and often vice versa, because I put up plenty of fronts of my own.
The breakups always took weeks, too. These grinding emotional autopsies before the wretched, long-suffering relationship could finally be declared dead.
My romantic history is basically that Gotye song on repeat for four hours. Super fraught and beautifully tortured at first, then by the fifteenth time you’re like ENOUGH WITH THE FUCKING XYLOPHONE.
I’m totally to blame. I wasn’t equipped to date actual human beings. I fell for a woman’s quirky dress sense or her tattoos or her art, one thing or another, then once the novelty wore off I’d lose interest. I’m cringing even typing this, but I feel compelled to be honest with you.
It sounds shallow. It probably was a little shallow, but more than that, I think I just felt empty. I was always searching for that perfect, unique, fascinating woman to stitch myself to, so I could quit feeling like half a human.
That’s too much to ask of someone. To complete you.
I wasn’t prepared for any of my exes to be actual people with their own feelings and faults. I was only worried about what being with them said about me. I often wound up with people just like me. Big on facades, but lost and echoing inside.
So while I’ve said “I love you” a dozen times and meant it, a part of me wonders, do I really even know what that feels like?
There’s got to be more than whatever I felt, because I was able to walk away from it again and again.
But something about you, about this, gives me hope. That suddenly I have a crush on someone based on nothing more than her words. Her thoughts. Her fears and dreams and cheese sandwiches.
No artifice, only substance. Sort of odd, mysterious, charming and sometimes ridiculous substance, but I like that. I can dig my fingers into it. It’s strange and squishy with funny lumps, but it feels good. So fucking good and real after swiping at holograms for all these years.
I don’t even know your age or your hair color or the sound of your voice or your name, but I like you. That gives me hope. Hope that maybe someday I’ll quit falling in love and simply love. I’ve always chased the noun, when maybe I should have been trying to master the verb.
I can’t believe I’m even typing all this to you. So soon. We’ve been chatting for what, four or five days?
