This Time it's Real

by Ann Liang

I’m generally pretty good—an expert, even—at pushing my feelings aside and disconnecting myself from everything,

Sometimes I’m convinced I’ll spend the rest of my life this way. Alone.

Sometimes I think loneliness is my default setting.

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 once heard this theory that when you dread something, time moves faster, as if the universe is determined to conspire against you.

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 every- thing 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.”

But throughout the whole evening, I keep being reminded that these feelings simply aren’t going away. Because this isn’t just a silly, superficial crush anymore. It’s more. It’s worse. It’s the realization that no matter how hard I try to protect myself, no matter how many barriers I build up and lines I draw between us, I am doomed to get my heart broken by Caz Song. It’s only a matter of when and how badly.

Because I know all too well how things will turn out after our arrangement is over: We’ll go back to being strangers, and I’ll be alone again, like I always am. I’ll never get to talk to him, to be this close to him, even if it’s just pretend.

“It’d be more accurate,” he continues, undeterred, “if you were to press your forehead to mine. Then you could properly compare the temperatures.”

Angry that I’ve already given him my heart and my trust, only for him to pull away time and time again. Angry that I even care so much.

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.”

But as I gaze out at the room now, I wonder if maybe the answer to that assignment was as simple as this. Right here. 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?

There’s something strangely intimate about calling someone in the dark. It’s like listening to your favorite song in the middle of a crowded subway; the world narrows down to just you and this voice in your ear, while everyone else around you goes about their lives, completely oblivious. It feels sacred. Like a secret.

She wants to leave now. And I don’t know how to make people stay; I never have.

I’m thinking that if I tell him what I really feel, just lay it all out there, there will truly be no going back from this. That it’s been hard enough just to get to where we are—from strangers to begrudging allies to actual friends—to demolish every painstaking brick of trust built between us by asking for something more. That I’ll have broken every rule I’ve laid down for myself, just to give Caz—beautiful, unpredictable, guarded Caz—all the ammunition he needs to break my heart.

“What—what do you care about, then?” “You,” he says quietly. “I want you, Eliza.”

You already have me, I’m tempted to tell him. More than I was ever planning to give.

I didn’t know if those other parts of me were worth wanting too.”

“We didn’t even have a fight or anything. It was just—we drifted apart. That’s what always happens when I’m involved, Caz. Every single fucking time. And you might say or think you want me now, but . . . that’s what will happen with us too. I’m certain of it.”

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....

“But I already know how it’s going to end,” I choke out. “I know. And when it happens—I’m going to be the one heartbroken. Not you—

Because yes, it’s Caz, of course it’s him, the boy who carried me through the rain and never showed his face again.

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.

“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.”

Hope is such a terrible thing. It’s like a bad habit you can’t shake off, a stray dog that keeps showing up outside your door for scraps, even when you have nothing left to give. Every time you think you’re rid of it at last, it manages to sneak its way back in. Take over. Cling on.

“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.”

Then he turns to me for the first time since that day in the rain and smiles. And my heart falls. Breaks upon impact. Because it’s his formal smile, the same smile he gives strangers and fans and interviewers like Rachel, the corners of his mouth curving up just slightly, neither of his dimples showing.

It takes me too long to recover, to pick my heart up from where it’s fallen like shattered glass.

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.

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.

Maybe there is some small, weak part of me that wants to be wanted, to hold hands with someone beautiful in the blue-dark, to breathe and hear its echo, to walk through the alleys of Beijing with another shadow falling naturally beside mine.

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

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

The city rises up behind him, and if someone were to assign me an essay about home again, I know exactly what I’d write.