A strange urge, a novel feeling, a new desire. I can’t shake it. I need to tell someone. I need them to know how much I miss her. Though it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. People often complain to me about their love lives, and I say, “Time heals all.” We all think our love is special. All these other people in love? Posers. Only we had the real thing. A love that couldn’t be replicated in a thousand years across billions of galaxies.

I loved her. The way she talked; her tired eyes. Those abnormally long pauses in the middle of her stories. Her freezing hands as I try desperately to warm them up. How she got excited and threw her arms around, flailing about. Her laugh—how it filled me with ecstasy, recharging whatever was left of my broken soul. When she leaned into my chest, and I held her tight, calling her a moron. When she got drunk and became uncomfortably loud.

I loved her. Our love was different, but all the same.

I never expected to fall for someone this fast. She made me question everything—the rules I’d lived by for years, the morals, the compass, the understanding of relationships. I wanted to throw it all out the window just to see her face next to mine in the morning.

She gave me something more dangerous than hope, more wicked than enthusiasm, more insidious than anything I’d ever known. She gave me a taste of what could be, and that’s a drug with the most unforgiving withdrawal.

There was a look in her eyes that I’d only ever seen in myself. It’s not quite sad but more melancholic—a longing and nostalgia, but for what? I’m not sure.

I loved her, but that doesn’t change a goddamn thing.