You Have a Match

by Emma Lord

That’s the thing with Leo, though. I always understand more about him in the beats after he says something than when he says it.

Maybe it’s why we’ve always kind of gravitated to each other. I pull Leo off the ledges of his thought spirals. He pulls me off literal ledges. We’ve got each other’s backs.

If you learn to capture a feeling, he told me, it’ll always be louder than words.

Words always fell short. Made the feeling cheap. Some things, I think, there weren’t supposed to be words for at all.

I was prepared to lose him, maybe. But I wasn’t prepared for what happens after the losing.

This is the person you are to me; these are the things I feel safe to tell you because of it.

knowing that no view I can capture will ever compare to this feeling—seeing it through my eyes while seeing it through his, letting us both bleed into a world where those two things can be the same.

“Maybe they were in some kind of secret society. Something mega embarrassing. It was the nineties, right? What was embarrassing in the nineties?” “Uh. Everything?”

“Honestly, maybe they were part of an emotional support group for people who watched too many movies about dogs where the dog dies. Is it just me or is it anytime your parents are like, ‘Hey, let’s watch this old movie from the nineties,’ the dog totally bites it?”

I duck out before he can touch me. I feel raw. Different. Like the cold has crystallized everything, made the things I didn’t want to see so clear that there’s no way to avoid them: it’s not just that Leo doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want anyone else to have me either.

Our eyes connect, and through the chaos, there is a pulse of understanding that goes deeper than friendship, deeper than sisterhood: it is the pulse of understanding between two people who are simultaneously and extremely fucked.

“I’m—I’m scared I’ll always feel like I’m not good enough.”

She didn’t want him to feel like he had to say yes and leave everything behind, but still wanted him to know that she loved him. Because sometimes trying to protect people from your own fucked-up decisions is so impossible that there’s no right and wrong way to do it—everything will explode in the end. You can only try to anticipate which direction the explosion will come from.

We’re both trying to catch up to people who seem like they’re already gone.

I think in life you can know you’re loved without peering too closely at the edges of it. It’s almost scary, seeing that there aren’t any—it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It just kind of is.

I can’t claim to know what the future holds—whether the two of us will be equipped to go the distance, or what kind of people we’ll be in a year or two or more on the other side of it. I can’t even say where I’ll be, let alone where he might. But it isn’t the knowing that matters. It’s the feeling that does—and this is deeper than the miles between us, more enduring than any odds we might face.

Leo laughs, and so do I, and he catches my laugh with his lips and this time when we kiss, I know I’ve finally reached the one height he’ll never ask me to come down from.

Our eyes meet and the moment stamps itself to my heart, taking up a permanent place in me before it’s over, and I hear Poppy’s voice in my head—If you learn to capture a feeling, it’ll always be louder than words.

I collide with him so forcefully that he ends up lifting me up from the ground and spinning me to absorb it, my legs wrapping around his torso and my arms so tight around his shoulders that I’m probably about to suffocate him. I lean back, grinning into his grin—the kiss tastes like cinnamon and warmth and Leo.