The Conditions of Will

by Jessa Hastings

He feels like the kind of memories I wish I had but don’t.

He’s like déjà vu. And you know how when that happens, your brain is like, “Wait, we’ve been here before,” and you’re watching everything unfold and you’re waiting for the next thing to happen and you’re like, “I knew that,” and then the next thing happens and you’re like, “I knew that too,” and every time something happens that you’ve been waiting to happen because you feel like it’s already happened even though it hasn’t, you feel this floaty sense of delighted satisfaction—that’s what it feels like to be near Sam Penny.

There are a lot of kinds of love in the world, and not all of them make sense all of the time.

Silence with him is five fifteen in the morning before the sun’s up and it’s still dark but the birds are singing.

He’s the heavy quilt you pull over your head when it’s too cold and too early to wake up.

Sam Penny doing any of those things would be poetry, but him like that on the bed with a book is Shakespeare.

we love a man who reads

You know how there’s a good kind of hurting? Like rubbing out a cramp? Or great sex, sometimes? Being near him hurts me all over my body. I think it’s because he’s what all the songs are singing about. Every single fucking one of them, they’re singing about him.

“You can have my—fuck—have whatever you want. Have everything.”

<3

Rooftops were invented so I could shout off of them about Sam Penny,

The nicest thing you can ever do for another human being is see them, and really see them, at that. To be understood is one of most base desires we as people have,

“I’ve met you, and I’m different now.”

We kiss in public, we hold hands, he holds doors open for me, he carries my bags, slings his arm around me—we, in conclusion, do the most generic, regular shit that couples do together, and it is, in a nonhyperbolic way, probably the greatest day of my life.

“When did you know?” “That I love you?” he clarifies. I nod. “Last Tuesday,” he tells me, gaze unflinching. I roll my eyes. “We met last Monday.” “Yep.”

INSTA love

And I think to myself, wouldn’t it be so lovely if we viewed ourselves through the same lens as the people who love us?

tattoo this quote on my soul

“I love you,” I tell him with this swelling feeling in my chest that’s a bit like when you’ve been lying on the sand at the beach on an overcast day, and the sun finally breaks through and the warmth of it drenches you to the bone.