No Looking Back
Walking those dark streets with her at night, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Wasn’t trying to fix myself or understand my life better. It just made everything better. That’s all. When she was around I felt the kind of happiness I’d only known from cheap sex or good wine—one or the other, doesn’t really matter. Something about the way she moved through the world, the bite in her voice, made me feel things I thought I’d stopped being capable of feeling. I started wanting things again. Started liking myself. That scared me more than I wanted to admit.
Opening up to someone means they can hurt you. That’s the price.
Without her I was useless—stuck thinking about her, the memory of her wrapping around me like something physical. I couldn’t get enough of how she felt, how she smelled, the simple fact of her existing near me. Real connection is rarer than anyone wants to say. We were racing against time the whole thing, both knowing it would end, pressing into each other anyway like maybe if we held tight enough it wouldn’t have to. Stupid, but we did it.
Kissing with that awareness underneath it—the knowledge that this was temporary, that the world was going to pull us apart soon. Every moment felt more real than anything else in my life, which sounds like melodrama but it’s just true. She wasn’t like the others, the hollow ones I’d gone through like they were nothing, discarded with this practiced ease. She mattered in a way that opened something up inside me. A clarity I didn’t know was possible.
I’m in a different life now, one I told myself I wanted, and she’s become this bittersweet phantom who walks past all the tired compromises I’d made peace with, proving briefly that something else could exist. You can’t stay there. You swallow it, spit it out, fuck it away—whatever you need to do to keep yourself intact as everything wears away. That’s just how it goes.
My future’s this gray thing stretching ahead of me and I’m walking toward it anyway. But I’m grateful you held my hand that tight before I turned away, grateful for the reminder that the things that actually matter don’t look anything like love, that there’s no philosophy better than pizza and Weezer and zombie movies, that the right person in the right city can undo your whole understanding of yourself. Even if it’s only for a little while. Especially then.