When I Think of You

by Myah Ariel

All these years you thought Sam was the one, but turns out, he was just a stepping stone on the way to finding him. And now, all those special moments with the guy who will be your forever—the giddiness you feel after the first date, that electricity from your first kiss, those flirty texts the morning after you spend the night—it’s no longer in the past. The good stuff’s in front of you waiting to be experienced with the guy who is your actual person. Because with the right guy, none of it ends like this.”

“Because he’s your mirror,” I say. “You see him, and all your wants and desires reflect back at you. Then, when he inevitably falls short of your high expectations, it’s not just him you’re disappointed in, it’s also yourself, for misplacing all that hope.”

Someone had to be the collateral damage on his journey of self-improvement. And I guess that someone was me.

If I’m honest with myself, holding on to all that stuff after all this time feels like a choice. Like in doing so, I’m choosing to be weighed down. Now is as good an opportunity as ever to stop being a bag lady. Someone who hoards all her trauma and drama, packing it away in various bags for safekeeping. Carrying them along with her everywhere she goes so she can unfurl them from time to time, if only just to admire all her problems. It’s time to move on.

“Well, for starters, it’s a verb. You don’t just feel love, it’s a state of being. Like breathing. You don’t think about it, you just do it. When you’re in love with someone, it changes you.”

Because when all is said and done, you are perfect to me. And I am ready to stop pretending that getting along fine will suffice in the place of perfect.

Truth is, I didn’t free-fall into love with Danny Prescott. I jumped headfirst and tumbled my way here. And even after all those cuts and bruises, I’m still falling, wondering if maybe this time we can land together.

Don’t confuse history with mere memories of the way things made you feel.

“I found love, and it’s the best thing in the world,” he explains. “But I’ve lost it, too—which feels like a metaphor for life. How it’s just an endless cycle of things lost and found.”

“Well, Danny, if you’ve found a love that’s anything like the one your parents had together, I have no doubt that by the time the story’s written, you’ll find your way back to it.”

“Think about it, you reflect each other. There was a time when he was closed off and emotionally unavailable and you blew in with your special way of feeling everything for everybody, and without knowing it, you helped him through a really hard time. And years later, isn’t that what he did for you?”

It’s like he’s granting me permission to take this time and space to figure it out, assuring me that he’s not going anywhere while I do. Loving me from a distance. Like he said to me all those months ago in the mail room: All things come in due time.

“I learned a valuable lesson: it’s really not my business what other people think of me.”

And now the world can see what I’ve always been in awe of.

Loving Danny has been hard. But like the others it’s also a constant, sure, and beautiful fact of my life. So in that case, who wants easy?

“The best movie I haven’t seen,” I continue, “is the one where that man tells that girl, who’s a woman now, that she’s not the only one who’s still in love, that they’ve wasted enough time apart. That he forgives her for the times she’s walked away. But that he understands why she had to. That despite it all he’s still going to be hers, as she has always been his. And that, together, they can figure out how to stay in love forever—like Nathan and Minnie.”

“This morning, when I woke up, I felt like today would be different,” he says. “And not for the reasons you might assume with the movie opening and the festival and whatnot. I felt it would be different because I like to think that when you love someone fiercely, and with all your heart, the way that I love you—you don’t let days like this one pass without making sure they can feel it. And when I woke up, I felt it.”

“So that movie you haven’t seen, it doesn’t exist yet. But if you want, we can make it. We can start tonight,” he says.

He does the same, as if checking that I’m here, too, ready and willing to accept and return everything he’s given to me.

“I was wrong. You were never the center,” I say. “You were the gravity.”

The whole world falls away and yet, I have never felt more grounded.

“I used to think that falling in love meant risking losing more than I could ever gain. Well, I’ve lost you more than once in my life and still, I wouldn’t change a thing. Because finding you, again and again, makes everything else worth it.”

“Kaliya Elise Wilson, my love for you is far too great for me alone. Will you do me the honor of helping me carry it for the rest of my life? Will you marry me?”

And just like loving Danny Prescott, saying yes is as easy as ta...