Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

If you don’t have it when you’re a proper grown-up then you have failed, just like so many of my art teachers who I have noted are “Miss” instead of “Mrs.” and have frizzy hair and ethnic jewelry.

No moment in my life will ever be as romantic as when me and Lauren were playing that gig on Valentine’s Day at that weird pub in St. Albans and I sang “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and Joe Sawyer sat at the front and closed his eyes because earlier we’d talked about Jeff Buckley and basically he is the only boy I’ve ever met who fully understands me and where I’m coming from.

the last stop on the Jubilee line and on the very farthest fringes of North London.

She is without ego; I think my piece of morning toast is important enough to warrant broadcast on social media (three channels).

Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay, and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down.

I found being a teenager one big, frustrating, mortifying, exposing, codependent embarrassment that couldn’t end fast enough.

The girl who was sober was riddled with anxieties, convinced everyone she loved was going to die, fretting about what everyone thought of her. The girl who was drunk smoked a cigarette with her toes “for a laugh” and cartwheeled on dance floors.

But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hungover girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy.

I didn’t have an exact idea of what had happened or why. All I knew was that I hadn’t been good enough.

I found being so tall as a teenager difficult—I never knew how much I was supposed to weigh, because every girl was half my height and talked about their “fat weight” as being a weight I hadn’t been since childhood, which engendered a great sense of shame.

But you can’t forget how many calories are in a boiled egg or how many steps burn how many calories.

All the hours lost in the cul-de-sac of your head torturing yourself with all the stupid things you said and did, hating yourself for the following few days.

The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.

The invisible dimension created from the history and love and future we shared for this one person. It was then I knew everything had changed: we had transitioned. We hadn’t chosen each other. But we were family.

I looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together; the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and the future dreams they would have discussed while drinking wine late at night on the sofa.

I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.

He’s got his half of the story and I’ve got mine; we carry them round like those tacky teenage necklaces of a heart split in two.

“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”

“I used to always worry when I heard something bad had happened to someone that writing would be an intrusion. It’s never an intrusion, it always helps. If there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s to always just send the letter.”