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That crush of happiness, that feeling that this is what life’s about: being somewhere beautiful, with someone you love.
I used to write these notes in a kind of panic, like every experience I hoped to someday have was a living thing growing in my body, stretching branches out to push on my insides, demanding to break out of me.
There’s nothing so off-putting to some people as someone who seems not to care whether anyone else approves of them. Maybe it’s resentment: I have bent for the greater good, to follow the rules, so why haven’t you? You should care.
When we were together, though, the game didn’t even exist. The rest of the world dissolved until I believed this was how things truly were. Like I’d never been that girl who’d felt entirely alone, misunderstood, and I’d always been this one: known, loved, wholly accepted by Alex Nilsen.
When I look back up at him, he’s beaming at me, and I think, I love you more now than I ever have. How is it possible that this keeps happening with him? “Can we take a picture together?” I ask, but what I’m thinking is, I wish I could bottle this moment and wear it as a perfume. It would always be with me. Everywhere I went, he’d be there too, and so I’d always feel like myself.
As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.
“Alex …” It takes me a few seconds to go on: “I’ve never really felt alone since I met you. I don’t think I’ll ever feel truly alone in this world again as long as you’re in it.”
“I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you.”
You asked me who I was, and—it was like the answer came out of nowhere. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”
And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down. We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it. But this, this is the moment I first think it. I am in love with you.
“It’s not your job to make me happy, okay? You can’t make anyone happy. I’m happy just because you exist, and that’s as much of my happiness as you have control over.”
Maybe things can always get better between people who want to do a good job loving each other. Maybe that’s all it takes.
Suddenly we’re not kids anymore, and it feels like it happened overnight, so fast I didn’t have time to notice, to let go of everything that used to matter so much, to see that the old wounds that once felt like gut-level lacerations have faded to small white scars, mixed in among the stretch marks and sunspots and little divots where time has grazed against my body.
You can’t outrun yourself. Not your history, not your fears, not the parts of yourself you’re worried are wrong.
“You’re not a vacation, and you’re not the answer to my career crisis, but when I’m in a crisis or I’m sick or I’m sad, you’re the only thing I want. And when I’m happy, you make me so much happier. I still have a lot to figure out, but the one thing I know is, wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll never belong anywhere like I belong with you. No matter what I’m feeling, I want you next to me. You’re home to me, Alex. And I think I’m that for you too.”
Tomorrow we will love each other a little more, and the next day, and the next day. And even on those days when one or both of us is having a hard time, we’ll be here, where we are completely known, completely accepted, by the person whose every side we love wholeheartedly. I’m here with all the versions of him I’ve met over twelve years of vacations, and even if the point of life isn’t just being happy, right now, I am. Down to the bones.
