One True Loves

You can’t capture love in a bottle. You can’t hold on to it with both hands and force it to stay with you. What has happened to us is no one’s fault—neither of us did anything wrong—but when Jesse left, life took us in opposite directions and turned us into different people. We grew apart because we were apart.

get it now. I get what you were saying. About how falling in love with Sam didn’t mean that you forgot me. That it doesn’t change how you once felt. It doesn’t make the people you loved before any less important.

Jesse and I were once ripped apart. And now we’ve grown apart. The same hearts, broken twice.

It’s like someone cracked me in half and found the rotten cancer in the deepest, most hidden part of my body. I don’t say anything back. I don’t look up. I watch as a tear falls from my face and lands right in my mug. And even though I was the one who cried it out, and I saw it fall, I have no idea what it means. I look up. “I think you’re probably

You wonder how each moment bled into the next and created the days, months, and years that now all feel like seconds? That’s how I feel. Right now. In this moment. It feels like our entire past together spans eons and the time I’ve spent without him is an insignificant little flash. I have loved Jesse since the day I saw him at that swim meet.

I was wrong before, when I said there’s nothing more romantic than the end of a relationship. It is this. There is nothing more romantic than this. Holding the very person that you thought you lost, and knowing you’ll never lose them again. I don’t think that true love means your only love. I think true love means loving truly. Loving purely. Lovin

I look at him,

Jesse is a different man than he was before. I am a different woman. And what has confused me ever since I found out he was alive is now crystal clear: We are two people who are madly in love with our old selves. And that is not the same as being in love.

I think you forsake the people you loved before, just a little bit, when you fall in love again. But it doesn’t erase anything. It doesn’t change what you had. You don’t even leave it so far behind that you can’t instantly remember, that you can’t pick it up like a book you read a long time ago and remember how it felt then.