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.