Your Face, Specifically
Strangers’ faces don’t stick. I’ll meet someone, they’ll make an impression—good conversation, interesting energy, something that registers—and a week later I pass them on the street and draw a complete blank. It’s not rudeness. It’s just how my memory files things. Zip codes: permanent. Faces: gone before the elevator doors open.
But not yours. Not that one. Your face burned itself into the bone behind my eyes and I haven’t found a way to sand it out. Your smell hits my bloodstream like something injected directly. Your voice does something I can’t describe without sounding unhinged—makes me want to come and die simultaneously, in some order I couldn’t explain to a therapist. The butterflies are long dead. What moved in after is louder and considerably worse.
Modern love has nothing to do with those old teen magazine photo love stories—the soft-focus ice cream afternoons and cinema dates, the petal-scattered bed at the responsible culmination of everything. That was a different era’s fantasy, and it was already a lie then. What we have now is war. You fight it or you break in it. Sometimes you manage both at once and still don’t come out ahead.
My own psychology fucks me in every direction it can access, without once attempting to redirect any of this toward something functional. Because it’s not heartache, not grief, not longing in any clean sense. It’s a mutated structure assembled from my own mistakes, missed windows, and a category of thoughts I should never share with a doctor or anyone I trust—because that conversation ends in a comfortable room on a green hill with soft furniture and a lot of scheduled activities.
My brain screams the correct answers at me constantly. I know the rules. I know exactly how to walk the line between magnetism and self-destruction. I know what I’m allowed to do and what I’m not. And then that person appears—that specific, damned person—and the heart seizes the controls, and I’m doing everything I know better than to do, driven by this horrible urgency that has never once produced a good outcome.
I tell myself I want good things. I’ve learned from my mistakes, or I perform having learned. I show up, I support, I celebrate and love as well as I can—knowing the whole time that every action makes it worse, that the harder I try the deeper I dig. Too long spent shaping and hoping, investing my own future into someone else’s story.
And then a third person arrives. Unscathed, unburdened, carrying none of the weight. He walks into her life like a weather event and takes everything—her attention, her body, her head—while I stand somewhere making a sound nobody hears, finally understanding that I should have moved on a year ago when the window was still open.
But I couldn’t. Modern love is a bastard. It demands the inhuman, fucks you in every configuration available, punishes every attempt at building something normal. With fantasies that show you a better version of events you’ve already lost. With thoughts that ambush you on the subway at 8am. The memory of how her body smelled. That specific sound she made when she stopped holding back. I want one thing: to live that moment once more. Just the once.
We’re a generation built on overflow and short attention—able to care about something for maybe four minutes before it slides down the feed. Which makes it genuinely baffling that one person can hollow you out this completely, and that every attempt to apply the same detachment here ends with me screaming silently at the ceiling at 3am, going in circles, no exits. Or worse: not wanting one. Because something in me is broken in exactly the right shape to keep coming back.
There’s an old rule that holds: the more you want something, the less you get it. So the harder I push your face into the crowd—the harder I try to make you one of many, just another person I’ve known—the more thoroughly you haunt me. Every corner. Every wrong song. Every time the light in a room is slightly off.
I know I’ll breathe again when your face is just a face. One I liked, or didn’t, or can’t quite place. Not a tripwire. I’m working on it. Until I find a solution, I’m leaning hard on the three A’s—alcohol, distraction, and anal sex—and hoping something heavy enough hits me in the head to give me actual control over my own thoughts. That would be so great.