You Have a Match

by Emma Lord

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.

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.

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.

“Eh, it’s all fun and games until they swore up and down they were teaching me how to say ‘good morning’ in Tagalog and I ended up telling Mickey to ‘go eat shit.’” Even in the depths of my possibly bottomless self-pity, that gets a laugh out of me. Leo knocks his shoulder into mine, another reminder of how fast we’ve filled up the air between us. “Yeah, yeah, kumain ng tae.” “I would, but my mouth’s already full,” I say, tilting my head at the plate I’m eating from so sloppily that several curious birds have flitted their way over. Carefully, I ask, “Do you think it’s helped at all? I mean … with the not knowing?”

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.

Like this isn’t the important moment, not the one that really defines anything; it’s just a moment built smack in the middle of all the other ones. A moment that carries you through to the next but isn’t any more or less important than the others because the end result will always be the same.

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.