You know the reason The Beatles made it so big...I Wanna Hold Your Hand. First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. Thats what everyone wants. Not 247 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche...or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they cant hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to I Wanna Hold Your Hand. And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.

Its one thing to fall in love. Its another to feel someone else fall in love with you and to feel a responsibility toward that love.

Things that matter are not easy. Feelings of happiness are easy. Happiness is not. Flirting is easy. Love is not. Saying youre friends is easy. Being friends is not.

misgivings n.Last night I got up the courage to ask you if you regretted us. There are things I miss you said. But if I didnt have you Id miss more.

I want love to conquer all. But love cant conquer anything. It cant do anything on its own.It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.

recant v.I want to take back at least half of the I love yous because I didnt mean them as much as the other ones. I want to take back the book of artsy photos I gave you because you didnt get it and said it was hipster trash. I want to take back what I said about you being an emotional zombie. I want to take back the time I called you honey in front of your sister and you looked like I had just shown her pictures of us having sex. I want to take back the wineglass I broke when I was mad because it was a nice wineglass and the argument would have ended anyway. I want to take back the time we had sex in a rent-a-car not because I feel bad about the people who got in the car after us but because it was massively uncomfortable. I want to take back the trust I had while you were away in Austin. I want to take back the time I said you were a genius because I was being sarcastic and I should have just said youd hurt my feelings. I want to take back the secrets I told you so I can decide now whether to tell them to you again. I want to take back the piece of me that lies in you to see if I truly miss it. I want to take back at least half the I love yous because it feels safer that way.

It scares me how hard it is to remember life before you. I cant even make the comparisons anymore because my memories of that time have all the depth of a photograph. It seems foolish to play games of better and worse. Its simply a matter of is and is no longer.

This is what love does It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters build the scenery guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible endlessly possible. And when its just the two of you alone in a room you can pretend that this is how it is this is how it will be.

We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us were wrong. Someone we trust.

livid adj.Fuck You for cheating on me. Fuck you for reducing it to the word cheating. As if this were a card game and you sneaked a look at my hand. Who came up with the term cheating anyway A cheater I imagine. Someone who thought liar was too harsh. Someone who thought devastator was too emotional. The same person who thought oops hed gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Fuck you. This isnt about slipping yourself an extra twenty dollars of Monopoly money. These are our lives. You went and broke our lives. You are so much worse than a cheater. You killed something. And you killed it when its back was turned.