written on may 7th

It's been a while since I have replayed a kiss in my mind, again and again. Our second kiss is one of those. It felt like the seconds right after you put your head underwater. Like being slowly pulled from the surface; at first a shock for its difference from reality, but slowly, intensely, like a new way of being.

We were on the beach, almost as if we had it all to ourselves. We had been drinking a bottle of wine, it was empty, I suggested we craft a message in a bottle and send it out to sea. You pulled out a notebook and pen without hesitation, started a letter and then passed it to me, one of those chain writing things that I have done in creative writing classes before. And each one, it was fun and funny to write, fun and funny to react to your response. It was something I've never done before with someone I've been involved with romantically. Typically I've kept those worlds separate, reserving romance for a realm that appears to have nothing to do with my normal self, the things I normally do to have fun, to make myself feel happy. It's something I would picture doing with someone who is a close friend and who I know I spend time with because we are so similar, because we enjoy each other's company.

In the midst of writing the message in the bottle, some poems and short stories fell out of your notebook, and you read two poems to me. One you had written in high school, and one you had written more recently. Neither of them were about me, or for me, but it felt intimate, and beautiful, and you offered to read them to me and it felt like cuddling up close to you, hearing your voice in a different way. When I was a kid, for years my grandfather and I would alternate reading pages out of classic works of fiction, and it took me a while to realize how special that was, how much I miss it. This felt like that. Being read to by someone who has nothing they'd rather be doing than reading something to me that I've never heard before.

What does intimacy really mean? I've learned that it doesn't mean sex. I think that intimacy means secret smiles, using your fingertips to trace scars. I think it means holding someone's hand, pressing your cheek up against theirs when it gets cold, sharing one pair of headphones to watch the same movie on an airplane. I think it means softness, and silence, and flowers that change color with the sun.

We get a limited amount of sunsets in our lifetime, and of those sunsets, there are only so many that we actually get to sit down and watch. The colors are warm and cool at the same time, the air is warm and cool at the same time, you can stare straight at the sun and see it as moving and not moving, all at the same time. We watched the sunset together, and it felt nice to be next to you, to sit with someone who enjoys things like sunsets as much as I do.

Here's the thing: I've kissed a lot of people. And since my ex, I haven't kissed anyone without it being a precursor for sex. Not since then have I kissed someone just to kiss them, just because I want to, because they want to. I hadn't realized, not until yesterday, not until kissing you, how much I had missed that. I don't know whether you are a good kisser, whether I am a good kisser, whether we are the same level, though I have a hunch about these things. But kissing you, it felt like kissing someone who is on exactly the same page as me. It felt like being a little afraid to let go, but beginning to let go anyway. It felt like I wanted to use both my hands, pull you closer, but it also felt like being entirely content with the moment and not wanting to change anything, like being sucked in to a feeling in all the right ways.

Could I see myself falling in love with you? Absolutely. You are everything I've never dated; you're someone I have things in common with, core things, things that we could go and do together, and both of us would want to be there, doing them. Sometimes we think of the same thing at the same time, sometimes we say the same thing at the same time. You said it yourself when I asked you what you liked about me: you said that we appreciate things in the same way, we understand things in the same way.

Most importantly: you don't make me feel like disappearing. In the past, I've entered relationships the way that people get on planes: a door sealed shut behind me, making myself as small as possible in order to fit, closing my eyes to the outside world and focusing on the minutes as they pass. And it worked, before. It felt like anything could be better than to be trapped in the place I was; it felt like looking to the sky, like clinging to something outside of myself in order to remind myself of my own existence, my own ability to fly.

You make me feel the way that my friends do. Talking to you, spending time with you, it feels like something I know how to do naturally. You are someone I enjoy spending time with, someone who doesn't make me feel like I need to change in order to fit. You make me feel like myself.

When I came to California, I was confident, I felt open to the world and was practically begging it to change me. I didn't realize that the more that this worked, the more that I allowed the opinions of others to dictate the way that I lived and the way that I experienced things, the more I would close in on myself.

Being with my ex, it felt like being a flower that was afraid to bloom. It felt like being stuck between floors on an elevator, it felt like not being able to make my own decisions without someone else's approval. It felt like being loved with conditions. But it still felt like being loved. There were good times, like the weekend before we broke up the first time. I remember lying on the grass in a park in San Francisco with my head in his lap, us staring into each other's eyes, the sun a little melted. I remember the way it felt to be around him, the way he said I love you first, how he loved to cook for me. Our relationship was full of passion, emotions stronger than others I've felt before, separation that felt like holes in my chest, insecurity that felt like standing at the edge of a waterfall.

But there were other times too. Like the time I wanted to go whale watching, and he came with me and pouted the whole time, made it feel like an experience I had forced him into. Or the time I brought up the Night of Ideas at the San Francisco Public Library, sheepishly, convinced and correct that he would never in a million years want to go with me. There was the time we went to L.A. together, and we went shopping along Sunset Boulevard, when I would have much rather gone to the art museum and looked at the model of a mammoth in the tar pool. There were all the times when I wanted to speak up, but didn't, for the sake of saving face. There were differences between us, vast and shifting. Perhaps that's why we both molded ourselves into entirely different people after we broke up. Perhaps that's why we barely recognize each other now for the different lives we live without each other.

But this isn't about my ex. As many things as I have already written about him, this story feels like the first shift forward in putting him entirely into my past. The first time we met in person, you said if I ever write anything about you, not to use your real name. No one has ever asked me that before, hard to say why. But it makes it feel like writing this is all the more sacred, all the more secret.

If I had to describe you in a word so far, it would be: unexpected. Or maybe parallel, or maybe similar or maybe same. What do you call it when you don't feel the need to explain yourself all the time? How do you describe the feeling you get when the last experience with a relationship you had was with your ex, who picked fights every time you inadvertently rolled your eyes? I guess the best thing about you so far is that you looked me straight in the eyes to tell me that I understand art in the same way you do and you seemed nervous like me when we first met and you brought me a book without me needing to ask. You make me feel like I don't want to write about my ex anymore.

Being in love is a funny thing. How to explain it?