Love turned out to be
almost entirely made of
small things.
Here is what I thought love was, before: an intensity. A feeling with a high ceiling. Something you would recognise by its volume.
Here is what it actually was.
Knowing which sauce. Knowing the order before it gets said. Knowing which complaints are real complaints and which ones are just weather. Knowing the laugh that means something is genuinely funny versus the laugh that means she is being polite to someone.
Being the person she calls when something stupid happens. Not something bad — something stupid. Anyone can be called about a crisis. Being the stupid-thing call is a much higher clearance.
love, the fall you didn't brace not for her face but the peace she brings in a loud, broken place
peace, in a loud place
That line took me a long time to get to and it is the truest thing I have written about her.
Not her face. I want to be precise, because "not for her face" reads like a humblebrag if you skim it. What I mean is: the thing I was actually attached to was not an attribute she possessed. It was a state I was in when she was around.
My head is loud. It has been loud since I was seven. And there was a period where it was, for whole hours at a time, not loud.
That is what I was in love with. Which is worth knowing, because it turns out that is a thing you can lose access to without losing the person, and a thing you can keep after the person is gone.
it was also extremely stupid
I do not want this chapter to be reverent, because it wasn't.
We were ridiculous. There were whole conversations that were just escalating nonsense. There was a running argument about food that neither of us was actually trying to win. There were nicknames that would be genuinely embarrassing to explain to a third party and which I am therefore not going to explain to you.
love is like a fart, you shouldn't hold it in (i stand by this)
I stand by it. Both the poem and the position.
the part that lasted
The small knowledge is the part I still have.
Nobody warns you about this. When something ends, you assume the big things go first and the small things go with them. It's the reverse. The big things — the plans, the shape of the future — those evaporate almost immediately, because they were always hypothetical.
What stays is that I still know the sauce.
Memory
I know approximately four hundred small facts about a person I am no longer in contact with.
Feeling
For a while this felt like being haunted by a filing cabinet.
What I learned later
It isn't a haunting. It's just what intimacy leaves behind. The knowledge was the love. It didn't stop being real when the arrangement stopped being possible.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.