is the title of this song by noah and the whale that I’ve always liked, because it’s true. Life never stops going on, and I’m pretty sure it goes on while we stand still. Like different parts of our bodies are trapped at different ages.

Imagine having an eight year old heart and hundred year old bones and the eyes of middle age but the mindset of a teenager. That’s how it feels a lot of the time. My spine is crooked and my feet are disgustingly calloused and perpetually dirty and I wake up sore but I go straight to the gym anyway.

Right before I go to bed, I always think of this one night when I was eight and how I wished I would grow up. And I think this is it, I’ve seen the other side, I’ve learned my lesson, and when I wake up I’ll be young again. I like to pretend I can wake up knowing what mistakes not to make and who to not trust and all the dark corners of the world to not get cornered in again.

But then somehow it’s always 8am and the light is coming through the white curtains in the new house in the new town with the old memories and I am still that girl who hyperventilates upon seeing him. And I wish more than anything there wasn’t still some obscure ‘him,’ another boy I confused for a reason that I can’t seem to get out of my system. I think about how long it takes to get the insides out of my body. Seven years for skin, childhood for teeth, a few hours for piss and a few days for bad seafood. Some people replace kidneys or lose tonsils but mine are all still in place. How long will it take to get him out of my system? Blood remains forever, as do most hearts.

I imagine myself getting rid of him in pieces, the way we clip nails and trim hair. It takes so long but bit by bit he goes. Until it’s an innocent sunday morning and I spot him though a crowd in moments. And he never sees me, never looks, the same as ever. He lives unchanged in the world of people with normal brain chemicals.

It’s like I have a sixth sense for the way he walks. New sunglasses will never hide the crinkle when his eyes smile, and there he is smiling while I try desperately to breathe evenly. While I try to stop noticing him without looking away. What age is my heart trapped in, to be so reeled in?

Time slips through my clenched fists as if it were his hand dropping mine. Every opportunity to say something filled by radio silence. I was the girl of his dreams and now I am a ghost in the background. And he is the elephant in every room, the back of stranger’s heads that feel familiar, the feeling of missing a limb or a lung if it had run off on its own and been better off alone.

I knew, the night I took a cab to the city and collapsed crossfaded in the back seat. I knew without a doubt what the feelings were, what I saw, what I still see. I remember thinking somehow I had to keep knowing and bury it, because he doesn’t know. Because sometimes the things we know are wrong.

And knowing aside, the truth is I deserve better. He is part the person making me mac and cheese at midnight, staying up to talk me down, and part the person ending the call, shutting the door, dropping my hand. I give everything I have to the people I love, always. I sometimes forget to take what I need for myself.

I am trying, to rest my back and stretch my arms further. To ask for what I need and close my eyes when we cross paths. We don’t get to choose who we love. We don’t get to choose who loves us. All we can do is make the best with what we have. I’ll still go to bed every night thinking about that shooting star I saw when I was eight. I’ll still wake up every morning knowing time is a one way road to the future and the only way around is through. Between inevitabilities I dream with my heart, wrapped in arms that I’ve lost to the past, that I’ve probably lost to other girls, that I most likely never had to begin with. Sleep sings melodies of softness, because that is what it felt like to be together. I, a woman of edges reduced to silk by the sound of his heartbeat.

Reality is not as poetic. He was never perfect or close to it, I cried myself to sleep almost every night. I woke up afraid. I lived with my heart in my throat and my hands wrapped tightly around my chest. I knew what was coming from the moment I saw him. I am prone to confusing mutual loneliness with love and infatuation with affection and to him I was never more than a cute girl, who was occasionally difficult and a little crazy. But some nights I swear he hand painted the big dipper in the sky just so we could drive up to see it.

Moments of transition are always the most difficult. There we are, passing though different doorways in different rooms in different houses but I still see him across the space. I still stop breathing and shrink into my stomach. There is an alternate universe where we live in polaroids and super 8 home videos and he never did all the stuff he did that hurt me. I know because sometimes I see it, as if looking through stained glass in a dream.

But here, he is still some guy in a lifetime of guys who have bruised me in one way or another. He is still the person who looked at me wide eyed as if he had never seen someone more beautiful, only to give up without trying. He wasn’t willing to put in the time. And I deserve time.

So it hurts, to see him smiling in the sun playing the sport he chose to prioritize over me. It hurts to watch my birthday pass without even a text, when I stayed up cutting ribbon and annotating and writing and rewriting and repacking everything so it would be perfect when he came home on his. But what hurts the most is that I ever expected more out of him. He is an imitation version of someone my heart has been looking for for a lifetime. Like a virgin cocktail, he lacks the most important ingredient.

The aftertaste will fade with time. One day my heart will catch up with my brain will catch up with my legs. L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N., time does nothing more than go on. And it will leave him behind me.