This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

Sometimes I think loneliness is my default setting.

I hope you always catch your train in time. I hope your birthday always falls on a weekend or holiday. I hope you land every role you audition for. I hope you have an umbrella with you whenever it rains. I hope you always snatch up the last bag of your favorite snack. I hope you always get the window seat. By the time I get to the last crane, my alarm clock is flashing. Six a.m. I’m exhausted and nearly out of ideas, and maybe it’s because of this that I let the truth slip out onto the page. 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.

Because even though I’ve found Caz Song attractive on a physical level for a while now, my biggest turn-on has always been competence. And as it appears, Caz is unbelievably competent at his job.

me too girl

“Maybe you can talk about how … I don’t know, how his laughter sounds. If it’s rougher in the mornings, or lower on the phone, or how he always tips his head back when he finds something funny. How—how you can only see his dimples when he smiles at something real. How you’re jealous of everyone who loves him, who knew him before you did. “And you probably didn’t mean to fall for him. At all. You probably had a plan, precautions in place. Maybe you were at peace with your loneliness, but then he sort of barged into your life, uninvited, and you’ve been reeling ever since, angry at yourself. At him. Now all you can do is sit around and think, like a fool, about the pale, moonlit curve of his neck and measure out potential losses and the weight of his words and prepare remedies in advance for what you’re certain will be the most devastating sort of heartbreak. But you continue to like him anyway. Stubbornly. Deliberately.

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.”

I can’t remember the last time I felt like this—thawed and vulnerable and exposed and wanting too much, my heart straining at maximum capacity. I can’t remember the last time I cried like this either. Not out of anger, or humiliation, or frustration, but because of an unidentifiable ache deep in my chest.

Home for them was one piece, one place, not something scattered all around the globe, fragmented into something barely recognizable.

“Besides,” he goes on, voice low, “a lot of people might like me for my—reputation. But that’s the side I show to them on purpose to make them like me. Nobody’s ever gotten to know me as well as you have. I wasn’t sure … I didn’t know if those other parts of me were worth wanting too.”

That for a long time now, between maybe the third and fourth move, the fourth or fifth friend I lost along the way, I’ve suspected that there’s something fundamentally unlovable about me. Something that makes it easy for people to forget me the second I leave, to drift out of touch no matter how hard I try to keep them in my life. I’ve said before that my default setting is loneliness, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s really fear.

“You hold everything in here, Ai-Ai,” she says sternly, pointing to her own heart. “For better or worse. But not everyone is going to guess at what you’re thinking like I do. No one is going to know how you feel if you don’t tell them. And until you do—you can never really know what’s going to happen.”

Maybe I’ll always be scared. Maybe the fear of getting hurt, of being left alone, will never truly go away. But even if it’s my default setting, I can fight it. So many beautiful things lie on the other side of fear. Like love. Like this.

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.

But certain joys, I’m discovering, are worth the potential pain.