You tell yourself it’s ridiculous to fall for someone right now. The world is ending on loop, and you’re still checking your phone, timing how long it’s been since his name lit the screen. Refresh. Watch another city disappear. It’s strange how simultaneous they can be – want and mourning.
Later, you lie awake and scroll until your eyes sting. You see the same videos: bodies under tarps, children pressing their sobbing heads into strangers’ arms, headlines that say “unrest.” Never “massacre.” Never “genocide.” You wonder if anyone has ever learned how to hold love in one hand and horror in the other without collapsing.
You start keeping a list in your notes app.
1. Cities that don’t exist anymore
2. Things he’s said that made you laugh
3. Ways to keep breathing
You tell yourself you’re a good person. The news bleeds across your screen, dripping ink through tissue paper. You recycle, donate, repost. You cry when you are supposed to. You want to look away, but you want someone to see you watching even more. Halfway through the video, you switch tabs. The ache turns into something greedy, eating at you in a way that makes you feel real again. You close your laptop and wonder if compassion is merely complacency.
He texts about the midterm. You think about the footage of the calculated decimation of dying cities. Buildings folding inward, smoke rising, faces flashed with panic and despair. You turn off the sound. You can’t bear to hear the voices. The color of the sky reminded you of your childhood bedroom. You think about how easily you glide between the two worlds: the personal and the televised.
Someone tells you it’s selfish to fall in love in a time like this. You want to say it’s the only thing that feels real. That gentle pulse under your thumb feels like music, lingering in the brief safety of someone’s attention. What holds you when language goes to sleep?
On a trip to New York City, you wander past the Climate Clock. It’s a sticky July and you are painted by sweat and cheap perfume. You grab his hand and squeeze tighter.
You tell him you’ve been tired lately. That’s the version of you that fits inside this conversation best.
Sometimes, you walk together after class. The air smells of eucalyptus and something charred. It’s October in Berkeley, which is to say it’s summer in full swing. He talks about his mom’s garden, how the tomatoes keep splitting from the heat. You nod, picture their skin peeling back to reveal small red hearts pulsing, unable to contain themselves. You want to tell him how it feels like the world is thinning out, like paper that’s been erased too many times. You want to tell him about the nightmares, about how you wake with sirens in your throat. You say nothing. You’re afraid to assign words to the feeling – afraid it will make it less real. Even more, you’re afraid he won’t understand.
When he laughs, it’s a kind of mercy. Maybe this is the point: to gather softness, to name it survival.
One night, he walks you home. The air hums with quiet post-midterm relief. At the corner where the street splits, neither of you moves. There’s a pause so heavy you can feel time fold in on itself the same way you gently fold a paper crane from scratchy origami paper. He kisses you, and the world rearranges into something gentle for a moment only long enough to remember it happened. You think about how your grandmother used to say “I love you” like a promise. When you try to fit the syllables in your mouth, they come out like a question.
In bed, you check your phone again. Another headline. Another number. You wonder how much the human heart is meant to hold. You try to Google it, but grow drowsy before you find the answer.
In the morning, you write in your journal. Love during genocide, a necessary contradiction. You press hard when you write, carving the words into the page to keep them from fading. Wanting tenderness in a world on fire is to still believe in a world that can breathe. Maybe that’s what makes it all so unbearable.
Still, when he smiles at you the next day, for just a moment, your chest opens. The sun catches the glass of the kitchen window and turns everything gold. It doesn’t last, but it’s enough.
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