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Sometimes I think loneliness is my default setting.
I guess my point is that I do believe in love. Really. I’m just not convinced that kind of love could ever happen to me.
“I’m kidding, by the way,” he says evenly. “You’re still way hotter than my manager.”
And this, I think, is my ultimate fatal flaw. Missing people who don’t miss me back. Clinging on to strands of string that shouldn’t mean half as much as they do. It takes so little for me to love someone, yet so long for me to move on.
When you care about someone, you want to be inconvenienced—you wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced by them every day for the rest of your life. That’s what love is. That’s all love really is.”
He only seems to relax when I scoot forward, bring my hand lower down to his arm, and tell him what I’ve wanted someone to say to me for as long as I can remember. What I’m still waiting for someone to say. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”
Thinking of all those rooms I walked through at eight, ten, fourteen years old and all the people I met in them … if maybe I left a piece of myself in them and took a piece of them with me too; isn’t that what homes are made of? A collection of the things that shape you?
“That thing about … being there for me. I want to be that for you too.”
“What—what do you care about, then?” “You,” he says quietly. “I want you, Eliza.”
Writing isn’t a form of lying—not the good kind anyway, the kind that makes you feel something. Writing is a means of telling the truth. Both the beautiful and the ugly.
Hope is not weakness. It’s oxygen, a crack in the window, the pale slash of moonlight across a dusty room. Maybe I should start learning to invite it in.
