I get a certain feeling of disdain when I hear or let myself use words like ‘million’ or ‘forever’ and yet I use them a million times over and forever will. So I’m trying to come up with a better way to say this, a sentimental wording and because I can excuse myself for not taking the extra time in choosing my words more carefully, I will just start what I’ve not yet started. It was the kind of whatever-it-was that involved true affection, the kind where it didn’t matter if you looked foolish, disheveled or bloated. All that mattered was if it felt good. After weeks of bliss it started to turn sour only quietly, like the fading scent from a woman’s neck or a man’s sweater that you used to wear and hold. It started when they began to seem far away even though they were right next to you, legs entangled with yours. You could have been gone by the time the sun hit their face but instead you stayed there feeling them drift further and further into the dark as their body only slightly moved away from yours. You blamed it on the weather that it was too hot to lie entangled anymore. That the intimacy was going through a drought but that the feelings you felt were real and that soon it would rain again. You did no rain dance, you just kept lying there experiencing your own dehydration.  In love there are rules. In this, there was nothing but the vast space in which you could screw up, get hurt, feel something. These sometimes perfect, sometimes painful moments teach us what it takes to make us happy, not just feel it. What happens to those moments? The ones where you watched his favorite TV show, waking him up at 6 AM to make pasta or letting him kiss you in front of people for the first time.  You only had a few mutual friends but your lives melted together like quicksand and even in those moments where you felt betrayal, hurt and then hopeful again, you didn’t know what kept you there but it was written in your bones that you were going to stay. When I think about him, I don’t think about the good times or the bad times. I think about the words he spoke,his smile, his scent, his taste, his work. His ever-taxing work that he was so driven and connected to. The way he thought he wasn’t smart enough to change the world. The way in which when things were ending I held on, eternally clutching onto him and still haven’t let go. The way I wanted to change his world. To send him on his journey and be happy to say goodbye if it meant that someday he would free himself from resistance and just create everything he wanted to. I saw it in him, why didn’t he see it in him too? All I want is the polaroid he took of me while I sat on his bedroom floor, the mickey mouse t-shirt that he wore as it continued to fall apart, the drawing he started of me sitting in his living room that he never finished, a photo of the two of us that wasn’t blurry. I want video of every moment we ever spent together.Those moments need to have a meaning.