The Unedited Truth About What It Feels Like To Be Attached To Your ‘No Strings Attached’

When something feels so right, it’s hard to believe that it’s not real.

When you meet someone that seems to be a mirror of yourself, it’s like immediately feeling that you are in a safe place, somewhere familiar and with someone you’ve known forever. Theirs is the only ego that can match and even contend with yours. No one else can read your mind the way they do and likewise, even though you don’t speak of this. You can understand every game they play because you play them too, you did this even before you ever met them. You know how to reel them in once they’ve pushed you out and they know how to push you out once they’ve gotten sucked back in.

There’s something between you two that feels different than anything else. There’s no commitment, but there’s ownership. There’s no consistency aside from being inconsistent and no matter how much time goes by, you can pick up where you left off and add another chapter, but with the same content.

Each time you think it will be the last time.

When it’s not, you wonder how long you both will go this time around trying to rid yourself of each other by not speaking and keeping distracted with others that you convince yourself will do the trick this time. You don’t know if you’re even going to make it a day, never mind the weeks that lie ahead. But you do it effortlessly because it’s all you know. It’s all you’re allowed.

When they’re gone again, you can go on, you can be happy and indulge in other things, but when they return, none of it is even relevant.

It doesn’t compare to that excitement and nervousness you felt when you got the text that they were almost there and about to be standing in front of you. Remembering how it felt when they would barely make it through the door without throwing you up against the wall and kissing you like no one else can. Flashbacks of him carrying you up the stairs laughing because you couldn’t get to your bedroom soon enough. Or that brief moment when you woke up for a split second and opened your eyes to him watching you sleep. You spent hours tangled up and felt like you could never get enough.

How can it be that none of this means anything to either one of you?

Do they remember it the way you do when they’re gone? It’s burned in your brain and in your senses. Can you really fake this kind of connection? Or do you have to run away from it?

You hate them for all of it. They hate you too.

You don’t want to want each other and need what you have, but you can’t ignore and resist the fact that you do. It’s not logical to anyone but the two of you. You know it’s no good for you, but it would be worse for you not to have it. You know that one day it will all just be a memory when one of you has finally come to their senses and finds something else that doesn’t have to pretend that it’s not real.

You can’t wait for this day, as long as it’s you that found the way out first.