I Promise To Not Write About You

We’ve been together for a year now, and yet I haven’t written anything about you. Usually, I write because I need to make sense of things. Because sometimes life happens to me in that way that you’ve seen, because I lack attention and replace it with naiveté; sometimes I’m left confused as to what just happened, and so I write.

I write to make sense of things.

And I have tried writing about you. But, I don’t have an explanation for you. I can sit here and type about our first date. I can describe myself at a boring class, “Instagram for Business,” looking surreptitiously at my phone placed on my lap. I couldn’t participate because you were changing the time of our movie, and I was anxious that maybe you would cancel. So my class on Instagram became an introductory course on how to stare at WhatsApp.

I can write about how it felt to get ready to meet you those first few times, mostly I can tell you because it still feels the same: anticipation. I look through my closet and imagine you looking at me, wearing this shirt. I pick out another, and another, until I find the one I think you’ll look at me and maybe never stop. I waft through my room, which is messy, and you know but pretend not to care (thank you), and dig through piles of discarded clothes, sift through jewelry boxes, fidget with my hair. I’ll look at myself in the mirror and imagine what you would see.

But none of what I imagine ever comes close. That’s something I couldn’t write about, even if I tried. What it feels like to be seen by you.

I can write a collection of anecdotes all leading up to this date. Something funny about our first meeting —a vignette of a self-confident, somewhat arrogant guy on a couch flirting with a different girl — something cute about the second, almost a year later — a college bar and that same guy flirting with me over spicy chips. I can go on for pages about the time you threw us in a freezing lake at 6 am, or the time we stayed up on my rooftop until one full bottle of vodka later the very next day. I can go through the ins and outs of many conversations, some meaningful, some not at all. Like, that morning we said everything sitting cross-legged on your bed, prompted by some silly iPhone game.

I could write a full book about our fights. The problems within our relationship that keep on pushing us to the very edge of our limits, just to bring us back where we started: not caring.

I can even write about sex. Explaining that never have I felt as free as I do when it’s just the two of us. How you have taught me that by letting someone else take control, in reality I have gained it.

I can do all of that, and still none of it makes sense. And I don’t want it to. I don’t need reasons, or explanations. It just is.

So, I promise to keep on not writing about you.