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The shape of your lips
and how they’re really red sometimes
The colour of your eyes
And the way you look at me when you say goodbye,
and other times too
Sharp jawline
The texture of your hair, the way it falls
Of course the muscle definition
everywhere
The height difference
You’ll tell me the things on your mind if I ask enough
How you can jokingly say ridiculously cliché comments and compliments
but actually kind of mean them
You call me ‘babe’, but not too frequently, and not too seriously
The way everything feels light
Genuine interest in the sciences
Things involving intelligence and coordination come so easily to you
or at least more so than they do to other people
Logic
How well my head fits on your shoulder
Did you know I hate hand-holding?
But I enjoy it with you
Your contempt for self-righteous pricks
and people who fall into that general category
Actually respectable as a human being
How you overanalyse things
because I do it too
And yet nothing is overcomplicated
You’re often in control, or seem to be
A lot of girls check you out wherever you go (I’m not sure if you’ve noticed)
Just the right amount of talkativeness
You put up with my music
Harry Potter, Lord Of the Rings, Pokémon, cats
You’re always hot, temperature-wise and otherwise

I think you sometimes question how much I like you
and I wouldn’t advise you against it because doubt is part of awareness
and I do it too
but I’ll tell you however many times and in however many ways until you believe me
if you don’t already.

What if emotions were like colours. There is no purple, only red and blue, and green isn’t really there, it’s blue and yellow. There is no anxious, it would be 40% hope, 60% fear.

The primary emotions, like colours, would be the basics: happy, sad, hope, fear.

I wonder what love or bitterness is made of.
Love: 55% happy, 45%hope
Bitterness: 60% sad, 40%fear
Anger: 35%sad, 65% fear
Nostalgia: 60% happy, 35% sad, 5% hope

I finally understand what people mean when they say, “a part of me will always love you.”

It’s not that you’ll stay in love with someone forever, but rather a literal part of you will always love them in whichever particular moment because that moment is fixed in time. It makes sense if you think about it in the fourth dimension.

and those are a lot harder to find. Most individual people aren’t individuals, they’re humans playing into general roles. The musician, the wife, the bachelor… They’re all people, but I want the person behind that.

no matter how silly that something is. Masses of people holding signs and yelling: they are at worst ignorable and annoying, but I suppose at best they raise awareness. Either way, I’m on the way to LA with my grandmother to protest Chinese communism.

from the cookie-cutter life that has been sculpted for me. I’m not going to have a retirement fund. I’m not going to work five hours a week for a six figure salary. I’m not going to spend the next nine years of my life in lecture halls. 

I’ll move to Venice and spend a year trying to convince myself that love exists. Men will buy me dinner in exchange for conversation and the prospect of anything more. They will all leave disappointed, and my stomach will fill while my heart grows empty. 
I’ll make a temporary career of pouring liquid caffeine for artists who find beauty in the bittersweet. It’s not money that pleases me, it’s the things that money gives me access to.
So I’ll tire of coffee and move to Amsterdam - sell my body to the primal pleasures that desperate men seek. Then I’ll take my skills to Monaco and bring men to their knees. I’ll fall in love with the one who is foolish enough to resist.
We’ll dance along the cobblestone streets of Prague, we’ll feel the hum of life in the resonance of Viennese symphonies. 

It’s settled. I’m quitting school and learning what I need from living.

I was sitting in the passenger seat, he was driving me home. Not once did my eyes waver from the road when they normally spend almost the entirety of the car ride intent upon his profile. My listlessness made me despondent.
“Talk, say something,” he quietly urged.
But I only glanced his direction and smiled briefly.
He turned to me again, “I’m about to say goodbye to you and I don’t want to, so, please, because I just want to hear your voice.”

To the one who makes me almost as happy as I make myself,

I am very fond of the way the sun is reflected as golden fragments of light in your hair, and how even though we converse nightly and see each other weekly, it never feels like quite enough.

There are two ways of not being satisfied: The first is seeing you and not speaking of anything significant such that words might as well be meaningless, where meeting my gaze fleetingly and your fingertips lightly brushing my skin are our only interactions. The second is feeling that time together cannot be quantified and thus never collected to completion.

I am satisfied with the dissatisfaction of perpetually wanting more, because if anything were ever perfectly enough, everything would become stagnant and all the stars would implode and we would asphyxiate in our own eternal boredom.

Exclusively yours with the utmost sincerity,

Tiffany

To my newly established boyfriend,

Sometimes I like to fancy that I know you quite well, but I don’t expect I ever will entirely. I only know for certain that I adore your dimples when you smile, and how your smiles are genuine enough to reflect your character, that I can trace the lines through which your life is carried by the force of your beating heart, and how my head fits nicely upon your shoulder.

Figuratively yours at this particular moment in time,

Tiffany

I know I can’t have him forever. Chances are that I won’t even want him forever. But knowing that one day we won’t feel this way about each other is a thought that makes me very melancholy. 

He asked me what it was like having a boyfriend for the first time, and I admitted that I’m not used to the label. It still sounds strange on my tongue and in my mind, but it’s charming in a novel way. 
He said the weirdness is mainly realising that you’re all of a sudden no longer single. It’s weird for him too because he’s always single for about a year between girlfriends and apparently adjusting to the idea of not being single doesn’t get easier with practice. 

Of course things don’t last forever, and I prefer that they don’t because ephemerality tends to make things more beautiful. I just can’t help feeling a little sad at the thought that one day I’ll have to adjust to being single again. I feel uncertain about involving myself in something that will inevitably fade, just because it makes me happy now. 

I want him to hold me while I ask him why we do things that won’t last. I’m afraid my voice will quiver and I don’t want to seem weak. I know he doesn’t have the answer, because there isn’t one really: we just do what makes us happy. And after this is all over, we’ll be left with fragments of memories that probably won’t even amount to an accurate representation of the relationship as a whole - that will pretty much be the outcome of this investment. But I don’t really give a fuck because he’s wonderful and we’re wonderful together and at this particular moment in time I am perfectly happy with everything I’ve ever really wanted. 

I love the little noises he makes when I kiss his neck. Last night, it was even better. “I want you to be mine” sounded perfect in his soft breathless whisper. We agree that putting labels on something makes people feel the need to fill those roles, which is stifling and terrible. But he thinks labels would be nice and I like the novelty of them (having never had a boyfriend, ever). So “I want you to be mine,” became, “I want you to be my girlfriend, sort of,” which evolved into, “I want you to be my girlfriend,” which was later elaborated with, “you don’t have to brag about never having had a boyfriend anymore, if you want.” He also drove me 183 miles to a school camping field trip (and then drove another 183 miles home). I stared at his face for literally no less than one third of the 3 hour car ride, and he wasn’t creeped out. Basically, M@ is officially my first boyfriend, and I think he is absolutely worth the 17 years of being single.

He is so pale, I bet if I run my fingernails down his chest they would leave red marks and he would gasp either from surprise or something else, and then his stomach would draw in, which also happens when people can’t breath because it feels so amazing. I would feel ribcages.

One particularly good night, I was able to imagine very vividly what it would feel like to run my hands through his hair. I got the texture and everything, with the little remnants of gel. While kissing and after running my hands through his hair a few times, I’ll take a handful of it and pull his head back and move my mouth down to his neck.

Sometimes (in real life) he blinks at me really slowly, in a manner of observation and just kind of looks at me. In my imaginings, he does that, but when his lids draw back, his eyes shine with desire instead of being all abyss-like with wonder. I can spend so many minutes in my mind getting that look just right - his eyes burning with such rabid longing, such hunger, and all of that passion trapped behind hazel screens.

But when he looks at me adoringly like lovers with lots of dopamine in their synapses do, I’ll be tracing the veins on the inside of his wrist to the life lines in his palm. He’ll laugh at me and ask what I’m doing. I’ll look up at him and say, “I’m memorising you.” And he’ll smile sadly then look away because he’d realise that somewhere hidden, I don’t believe him when he says he’ll never leave, not because I find him untrustworthy, but because that’s just what people do. I’d lie there next to him, fingertips tracing skin, trying to save him away in the depths of my memories while he’s still there, preparing for the days when he won’t be.

“We look really good together. I mean, I’ve had quite attractive girlfriends in the past, and if I were to compare you side by side it would honestly be a tough call. But as a whole, there are so many little things that make you better.”
“Things such as what?”
“They’re probably really stupid things that nobody else would notice, hahah, I like details, remember? I’ll tell you sometime. Not over the phone tonight though.”

I’m going to make a list of things I like about him so that I won’t be at a loss for words when he runs his fingers along the contours of my body as we lie together on Friday night.

• The way he smiles when he notices me looking at him from the passenger seat
• Dimples
• How easily his neck bruises
• The quiet “mhmm” when I say something he was hoping to hear
• His ability to understand people even though he may not be able to relate to them
• He can fill silences but prefers to listen
• How he looks better in pictures next to me than ones alone
• His posture is wonderful
• He knows lots about lots, especially in regard to business and finance
• The texture of his hair
• I know he has the self-control to resist my usual inadvertent manipulation
• That soft “okay” when I ask him to do something
• He doesn’t mind driving more than an hour to see me, then driving back
• How his vains are visible beneath his skin
• His natural tendency to weigh pros and cons
• The way he says my name

Now I’m going to make a list of his typical characteristics for which “exceptions” have been made:

• Dates girls who are older than him
• Doesn’t enjoy cuddling, hand-holding, etc.
• Dates girls who are generally taller than the average female
• No public displays of affection
• Doesn’t talk on the phone while walking places
• Dates girls who are more sexually experienced than himself

We tell our thoughts, suggest movie recommendations, try to give as much of ourselves to someone and they’ll give us parts of themselves in return. It’s hopeless because nobody will ever know anyone else entirely, and maybe it’s better that way. But we are so isolated; our pasts are ours alone and there are no words to truly encompass every thought.

Even when our clothes have been stripped and lie on the floor as we lie tangled within each other, we can never really be together. The layers are constantly there. Even if we remove those layers, peel back the millions of sheets of cells, your heart will always be yours, and mine will always belong to me.