It’s not about falling in love with people you can’t have or even anyone who will have you (although both are true and in small, destructive ways have served you well), it’s about even trying at all.

You are so unwilling to move, even as you are so incredibly willing to be moved. And you can write all the prose poetry you want about how you imagine her or how you feel she has done you a disservice or how you are standing with your arms wide open and your heart on your sleeve, but you know how love really works.

It’s taking small, scary steps toward each other and there is a lot less falling than talking with tears in your eyes and hearing things that make you wish the world could stop when she parted her lips, and to this point, you’ve only been willing to do the first few things, as if loving the idea of a person would be enough to make them real when you’ve known the whole time that falling in love is just work that you’ve been unwilling to do.

I wonder if anyone has written a poem solely so that one day someone would see it tattooed on a girl’s inner thigh.

You look at the tears in her eyes and you try to see them as they are, but all you see them as is a gift. You want to thank her for them, for trusting you with them when you didn’t ask, for telling you things when you didn’t ask, for having the courage to look you in the eye with tears in them when you didn’t ask.

And, of course, parts of you raise up--you should say something inspiring, you should comfort her, you should make her laugh, you should do anything but stay still and look at her--but it’s your gift, you can’t stop thinking of it as a gift.

Your heart takes those tears, a real intimacy, as though they’re gold coins and you feel like they’ll vanish if you tell her what they mean to you, so you don’t.

But you should.

You look at her and you think, you’re so sad, thank you and that’s exactly what you need at this moment. Someone who can see you--not as you were, how they want you to be--but you, as you are in this moment at too early in the morning in the quiet of her bedroom.

I don’t know how the quiet, invisible love affairs don’t break your heart more--you have to swallow it back down every couple of seconds, build it a coffin and bury it six feet under before anyone notices and still.

Still the heart is so determined, it claws its way back up, your waking, vital, beating nightmare, and it falls in love again.

It makes you remember simple, but terrifying things like your name on his voice over the walkie-talkie or how small his waist is when he tucks his shirt back into his pants. It gives you a burgeoning affection for baby blue pick up trucks that you can’t explain away except that maybe your heart hopes he’s sitting in every single one you see.

But it doesn’t imagine, that’s the thing about quiet love affairs that hurts the most. Your heart refuses to overstep, preferring to tear off all its skin crawling back to the surface, over and over again, than to imagine it’s worthy of having what it truly wants. What it’s making you want.

Love is measured in loss, though, isn’t it, and you have lost him more times than anyone else by now, your heart rising and dying when his eyes turn to you or they don’t. He says things to you that you don’t hear because you’re so busy counting your losses and that can be love if you want it to be.

Your heart is not insecure and your heart is not afraid--of him or anyone else, not anymore--your heart is not trying to be a martyr or a fortune teller, it is just living the nature of things, the nature of a quiet invisible love affair.

It’s not inevitable, it can be tipped either way with a word, a thought, and it’s not unique, but it is shaped by him, the corporeal him and the bits of him your heart drags down to its grave, a magpie with your name on his voice, his small waist, and baby blue pick up trucks, and even if these things are not really him, they become living, breathing parts of you. The vengeance of your heart every time it bursts free.

It’s chaste, these quiet, invisible love affairs. Because your heart doesn't live long enough to catalogue enough of him to blueprint a plan--all you have is this haze of want, a maddening desire that won't’ take shape. It feels like your blood is one giant magnet, pumping through your leaden heart with great difficulty, stuck to your iron skin and grating as all the magnets in his blood scream at your magnets.

And it’s all over in a couple of seconds, nailed in with your heart, stronger for only having lasted that long.

And I guess the worst part is that he doesn’t know because your heart makes it so hard to get to your lips. Maybe he’d be kinder if he knew: he wouldn’t say your full name, he would tuck his shirt in before he was on the floor, he’d move the truck.

Or maybe he’d be crueler: smiling the way that pulled the hardest at all of your magnets, lifting his shirt up and out of his pants on more occasions, raising your heart up to **** it himself.

But he does none of these things, the quiet, invisible participant in the love affair he doesn’t know your heart is having, and he keeps doing all of the things that make your heart spring up, live its transgressions, and die.

To be reborn to the same mistakes.

It’s the worst part, but it’s not the saddest part. The saddest part is that one day, because your love affair has been so quiet and invisible, your heart will grow weary and it won’t break out of the coffin you built. You will have to build a tombstone for the love affair and you will want to put his name on the marker, as remembrance for all of the things your heart kept of him to bring with it into the afterlife.

But instead you will have to put your own name and live with the fact that he has no permanence when your heart doesn’t live and die by him anymore.

No, really, truly, the saddest part is that your heart is a graveyard full of tombstones with your own name on them.

She’s got pretty eyelashes, long and curled, and she’s always smiling, but she squeezes her eyes shut (blue, maybe), scrunches her nose up, gags, spits it out, only lets it run down her chin, refuses to swallow it.

Sometimes the men say nothing, sometimes they say disgusting things, things that would make me cry if they came out of someone’s mouth, but sometimes I think these words at these girls.

Whisper them at my glowing laptop screen with my hand under the waistband of my pajama pants.