This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

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.

“You won’t fall,” he says, like the notion itself is ridiculous. “I won’t let you.”

Don’t be afraid of vulnerability.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

“Caz, I’d love to be inconvenienced by you. I wouldn’t mind being inconvenienced by you for the rest of my life.”