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.