This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

Words just move me. A beautiful sentence will sneak under my skin and crack me open the way a phrase of music might, or a climactic scene from a movie. A well-crafted story can make me laugh and gasp for breath and weep.

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 know there’s this popular mindset of “I’m strong and independent and I don’t need anyone,” but the truth is: We do need people. People who’ll laugh with us and cry with us and make the bad days bearable and the good days better; people who’ll remember what we forget and listen even when they don’t completely understand; people who’ll need us back. It has nothing to do with strength at all, and everything to do with being human.

I hope you remember to miss me when all this is over.

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?

“Most sincere things feel at least a little embarrassing. It’s part of our defense mechanisms. Our heart’s way of protecting us from potential hurt.”

All this time, I’ve prided myself on my ability to lie, to spin a story out of nothing, to act like I don’t care about anything. But insincerity is easy. Bullshitting your way through things is easy. It doesn’t require any emotional attachment; there aren’t any stakes involved. It can’t hurt you, because you never believed in any of it anyway. But telling the truth—saying exactly what you mean, how you feel, to the people you care about most … That’s one of the hardest things in the world. Because you have to trust them. Trust that they won’t hurt you, even when they have the power to.

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.