The First Bad Man

by Miranda July

Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.

Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realizing the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.

If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

We would lie this way forever, always saying goodbye, never parting.

The details would be washed away; for example, it would not be told as a great American love story for our time.

This can only end in heartbreak and I’ll never recover.”