(please note, I use the word love very loosely)

August. I love August. I love the way the letters roll off of my tongue, I love the nervous anticipation for the next school year, I love the way we gather like moths to a porch light in protest of summer’s end. I spent my August in the heart of New York City. I loved every minute of it. I loved the late nights working for the newsroom, I loved the walks across campus and the wax-melting heat waves. I learned to love the august I became.

I met a boy. He was sweet, beautiful, and exciting to toy with. He pointed at me in the childish game of Paranoia when asked who he thought was the prettiest girl in the room–I felt a rush of cold go up my spine as I weighed the possibility of my next mistake.

As the weeks passed, I was swept into this romantical love story. I remember our fleeting eye contact across a busy student common room–the way we both looked away–hoping the other didn’t see our stolen glances. I remember the way we watched the cars drive by on the overpass as he told me how much he missed being behind the wheel back home as the sun painted the sky violet. I remember the way he insisted on taking me on my first date after I told him about my embarrassing number of situationships and even more embarrassing lack of relationships.

“I’ll be gone for most of tomorrow, but when I get back, I’m taking you out.” he texted me.

I threw my phone across the dorm room, cheeks flushing red, as I had realized what I had done. I brought my palms up to my face, obscuring my vision, and squeezed my eyes shut. I was impressed by his chivalry–stunned by his sudden display of bravery. I knew we would last a week. I said yes anyway.

He planned our dinner. I curled my hair. I put on a white dress and unbuttoned the first clasp. I slid a layer of maroon over my lips. As we walked to the restaurant, he slipped his hand into mine, fingers interlocking. He told me I looked pretty. I told him I felt nervous. We sat in the restaurant for hours, watching it get dark as we traded stories. I ran the tip of my heel up and down his leg under the table while we argued about politics. He made me feel smart; I liked that about him.

Truth be told, I liked a lot of things about him. I liked his dimples and the way he ran his fingers through his hair. I liked his chest and his laugh. I liked the way I laid in his lap as I scribbled in my notebook, knowing my handwriting was too messy for him to read. I liked the way he held my waist on the subway, body pressed against mine, stabilising me when my heels provided ground too narrow to stand on. I liked the way he would listen when I read him my work, the way he would tell me I was a little insane. It all came so naturally. It all felt so easy.

We would talk about how this summer felt like a fever dream; how it felt like we were living on borrowed time. What was true? What was not? Did it matter? It didn’t feel real. I was only playing pretend– acting again.

When I left, we exchanged letters. I’m sorry we couldn’t have been anything more than we were. I wish this could’ve been different, he wrote. But I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t sorry at all. He was perfect. We were perfect. Maybe we weren’t in love, and okay, maybe we weren’t committed and sure, he didn’t know my middle name. But we were sweet, and fleeting, and hopelessly exciting.

I tell myself I have always been a hopeless romantic. As a little girl, I swooned over TV kisses in my favourite romantic comedies. I ripped pages out of novels, scribbling hearts over the most enchanting of lines. Most of all, I screamed along to love songs.

I had unconditional, undying love for the one and only Taylor Swift. Maybe it was the catchy lyrics or her bubbly blonde persona––she had a certain allure that made my seven year old self scream her music word for word. My friends, on the other hand, often found her music boring and repetitive.

“Don’t you think it’s weird all she sings about is love?” they would ask accusingly.

I would reluctantly agree, but the one question that burned into the back of my head remained constant.

What else is there?

Because of such appallingly idealistic longing for romantic love, I placed my entire value in being loved. I have fallen in love with just about every person I have ever met. My friends joke that I could fall in love with a tree stump if I spent enough time with it. 

In Swift’s album folklore, she weaves an intricate love story between August, James, and Betty through three songs. In betty, James tells the story from his point of view. Betty is the love of his life (at a mere seventeen years old), and Augustine had only shown up as a summer fling, a figment of his worst intentions. She’s presented as a filler, “the other woman”, so unimportant, she isn’t even worthy of a name. 

I think I have always been Augustine. I blame myself. I have always been too naive, too quick, too agreeable, too easy. I resented myself for it. As much as I tried, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Why I could only be characterized as a fling, a friend until after midnight, a filler until the one comes along. I felt like I was constantly losing things, losing people, that were never really mine. 

I have always associated love with pain. I mistook stress-induced stomach pain for butterflies, and confused red flags for pretty pink hearts. Control for protection. Obsession for adoration. Mania for passion. At some point, I embraced my track record. I am not a stupid woman. I knew I had this insatiable, maddening hunger for love, and I knew how to satisfy it, even if it was only for a night. I exhausted every facet of myself, moulding my body like wet clay, slipping on white dresses or sliding on maroon lipstick, becoming everything for a couple hours, then nothing at all.

Even with my constant attempts to shy away from love, to my core I am a masochist, and a glutton for punishment. 

With this boy, this kind, beautiful boy, I was able to become whomever I wanted for a couple weeks. And God, did I take advantage. I think we were only meant to be in each other’s lives for a couple of weeks. He forever exists in my mind as the sweet boy who threw his laundry in with mine. I, in his, the girl who obsessively recited the lyric poets engraved in the library walls. Our memories of one another were never tainted with the pressures of the outside. I have perpetually lived and embodied the manic pixie dream girl trope, appearing and disappearing through people’s lives like a toddler with a bubble gun. I have always felt guilty, or used, like something was wrong with me for not being able to be the girl that stays. The girl that is the one. But why should I give a shit? Not all love has to be this grand, sweeping romance with a Happily Ever After, sometimes, it can just be. 

 For too long, I have expected all kinds of love to have so much depth, so much pain and labour for it to be true. But for the first time, falling in love didn’t hurt. 

And for the first time, I liked it.