This Time It's Real

by Ann Liang

Which, rationally speaking, is a small thing. Insignificant. But aren’t small things exactly what friendships are made up of? Frayed string bracelets and late-night texts and compilations of your favorite songs? When you take those things away, what do you have left?

miss a lot of people.” 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.”

This is the closest I have ever gotten to voicing the truth: that I’m afraid. 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.

And even though I miss them both intensely, with all my heart, in different ways, missing Zoe is almost worse. Because there aren’t thousands of books and poems and movies out there to describe exactly what I’m feeling, or lyrically beautiful songs for me to cry to and sing along with in the car. There’s no guidebook on how to survive this kind of fallout, no prescribed remedy to soothe this particular kind of pain. Romantic breakups are romanticized constantly, talked about everywhere by everyone, but platonic breakups are swept to the side, suffered in secret, as if they’re somehow less important.

“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.”

Hope is not weakness. It’s oxygen, a crack in the window, the pale slash of moonlight across a dusty room.