Love on the Brain

by Ali Hazelwood

The real villain is love: an unstable isotope, constantly undergoing spontaneous nuclear decay.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a community of women trying to mind their own business must be in want of a random man’s opinion.

MARIE: Did she at least get ugly while she was gone? SHMAC: She’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“There is no other neuroscientist I’d want to do this project with. Not a single one.”

If there is one thing men hate more than a smart woman, it’s a smart woman who makes her own choices when it comes to her own sex life.

I want to buy her flowers, food, books. I want to hold her hand, and I want to lock her in my bedroom. She’s everything I ever wanted and I want to inject her into my veins and also to never see her again. There’s nothing like her and these feelings, they are fucking intolerable. They were half-asleep while she was gone, but now she’s here and my body thinks it’s a fucking teenager and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. There is nothing I can do, so I’ll just . . . not.

“Can you stay? Please? I know you’d probably rather be—” “Nowhere else,” he says, without skipping a beat. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

There’s someone in my corner. A guy who loves Star Wars, and is too tall for space, and will take care of a kitten for half his life.

“Eventually I had to accept what my therapist always said: all you can change is your own reaction to events.”