"Do you ever feel like you're about to die?"
"Like a car crash?" she asks.
But that's not what I mean at all.

What I mean, is when you're so in love with someone who might hate you.
You never get to see them,
but when you do it's with a bunch of other people
whose only interest is to make noise.
And so you think about Someone,
never talking to or about him,
which makes you think that love is a figment of your imagination
or a word you don't understand.
I go back and forth between
"everything is science" and "everything is emotion."
So sometimes, when the love hurts especially bad,
I think it has to be the kind of emotion that can't be explained with science.
In which case, I'm probably mentally ill.
What part of me is holding the love?
It's not my actual heart.
Not my brain.
Not my hands.
That must mean the only part of me that isn't scientific is that unearthly thing that contains love for Someone.
This thing makes me cry real human tears
and when I hit the wall with my closed fist that is not holding love but empty air,
it produces physical pain.
But there is something else this thing holds:
the feeling that I'm about to die.

"Yeah, like a car crash," I nod in agreement.