You’re going to think about what else is out there, but all of that noise is just noise, he tells me and a part of me believes him.

The thing is, there is magic in loving. There is a softness to romanticizing moments and people and sharing moments with people.

I like to think about the good things, like his neighborhood on the Upper West Side, the brownstones, the tree outside his living room window, the curve of his spine, the tenderness of his fingers twitching as he’s falling asleep, the delicacy of the freckles on his cheeks. But I have a hard time acknowledging the things that matter more: those long silences, the heavy conversations we avoided having because we knew it would be heavy, the tension we never thought would be hanging over our heads, even after all this time.

I look at things differently now. The thing is, I make his body into a metaphor because it forces me to feel it as it’s leaving. I think about the unrequited desire and the dirty lust as a means of understanding that sometimes, love isn’t meant to happen between two people. As badly as you believe in what could be, it’s the longing that keeps you apart.

The thing is, Manhattan is for lovers and he’s not mine to love anymore and I’m not his to try and love this time.

You can’t lose something you never had, someone tells me, and I see it clearly now, how quickly we lost each other in the noise.