“It’s so boring without you” one of them said. “You were so entertaining.”

I’d been comedically bad at the job, working PR at a luxury fashion house, something that required a level of organization I simply did not possess. My responsibilities involved arranging racks, organizing the fashion closet, preparing samples for fittings and scheduling messengers, all tasks I approached with the incompetence of someone whose mind was permanently elsewhere. The only thing I seemed capable of contributing consistently was myself as a source of amusement. I told chaotic stories about dating and nightlife and whatever humiliating thing had happened to me the night before, usually involving some beautiful LES drummer I convinced myself was the love of my life. I loved these moments at work, all of us vaping and whispering and drinking iced Matcha latte’s. Their laughter and attention made me feel, in an environment where I so often felt like a useless moron, somewhat valuable.

By midnight the party had dissolved into the usual Manhattan blur of air kisses and influencers sitting in dark corners on their phones., At some point I ended up taking shrooms with a male model who looked exactly like Smith from Sex and the City, sitting in a dive bar a block away while he talked mournfully about the burden of being so lonely and so beautiful. The hallucinations hit suddenly. The bartender had three heads. The walls took on a sickly breathing quality. I became fixated on Model Boys’ Alice in Chains tee and overwhelmingly certain I was about to projectile vomit all over it, but thankfully did not.

Later at home, standing at the kitchen sink eating saltines in the dark waiting for the nausea to pass, I had the realization that I did not want to be this kind of person anymore. I did not want to be the girl who sat in sad dive bars with random strangers at 4am. But more than that, I did not want to be the entertainer. I did not want to be the girl who exists to be consumed.

For most of my life I’ve understood that turning yourself into a caricature made other people feel more at ease, and that loving yourself too openly (especially as a girl) made you a delusional idiot. There was a comfort in diminishing myself or acting shocking and also a logic to it: if I volunteered my own humiliations before anyone else could reach for them then nobody could weaponize them against me. (Or at least that was what I believed then).

This instinct did not begin in adulthood, or even in my teenage years as the certified “class clown.” When I was seven, I pretended not to know who George Washington was, despite obviously knowing. I guess I already understood, even at that age when I was tiny and still decapitating my barbie dolls, that there was a social currency in becoming a spectacle of your own making. It felt closer to a compulsion than a personality trait, this reflexive need to mock or diminish myself, to sand down anything too sincere before somebody else could react to it first. If there is a single word for it, I guess it was performance, though that makes it sound more intentional than it felt. Most of the time it happened automatically, like flinching or biting your nails.

When I was twenty-one, I started a jewelry brand with a friend and almost immediately fell into the role of the unserious business partner. She was deeply insecure, so instinctively I began diminishing myself around her to compensate. I joked constantly about being disorganized and incapable of professionalism, exaggerating my own incompetence. When the company collapsed, she threw it back at me. “It’s hard to work with someone so unprofessional” she said. “Even you admit that about yourself.” How could I explain that I had only ever said those things to make her feel safer beside me? That I intentionally made myself smaller because female friendship so often seems to require this careful management of envy and insecurity?

Of course this impulse bled into my romantic relationships too, especially with the younger pop musician whose success made me feel, irrationally, that I needed to become smaller around him. I performed inadequacy compulsively, told him my writing was stupid and that I didn’t really care about work., That my real interests were rotting in bed and vaping. I exaggerated how much I drank. Sometimes I even ordered drinks I didn’t want because sobriety felt too exposing, like accidentally showing someone the wiring behind the walls. It felt weirdly safer to become a self destructive caricature than risk being seen honestly.

We broke up soon after, mostly because of his constant belittling and the way I never felt real around him, only lesser. Every concern I brought up was brushed off or reframed as irrational or immature. His final line to me was: “I never thought I’d be saying this to a 26 year old, but you have a lot of growing up to do.”

And maybe he genuinely believed that. Or maybe I’d spent so long performing immaturity out of some reflexive need to soften myself or keep the atmosphere nonthreatening that eventually it became the only version of me he could see. Which is maybe the real danger of these performances: if you repeatedly insist you are chaotic or incapable of being taken seriously, eventually people stop searching for evidence against it.

When I started posting online under the name IsabelUnhinged, the performance intensified. The self deprecating, unstable hot mess persona became exaggerated because exaggeration is what people reward online. No subject felt off limits: jealousy, cheating, hookups, all of my worst qualities laid out openly for the world to digest. I was brand unsafe, which felt radical in its own way. I would never be one of those girls linking a blouse on her Instagram story or talking about a new mascara or even showing my outfits, (despite how fabulous they were). Instead, I became the girl who said what everyone was too scared to say. And because I’d always possessed this pathological instinct to turn myself into something consumable, monetizing it felt like the obvious next step.

When I started going viral, people would constantly ask whether I was the same in real life. And the answer was always yes, of course I was. But also no, because after a while the performance started feeding itself and I could no longer tell which reactions were mine and which belonged to the version of myself I had created for other people. Very few saw the real me. Because the second I entered a room, especially one filled with people I wanted to impress or who made me nervous, something in me automatically reorganized itself around entertainment value. Any intelligence or seriousness or vulnerability seemed to retreat instantly, like an animal backing deeper into the woods. My priority became making people laugh or giving them a story to leave with. And because self destruction has a way of seeming charming in a woman, especially when she stays pretty and articulate through it all, there eventually stopped being any clear limit to how much of myself I was willing to hand over. I was never able to predict how far I would take it. The only thing I knew for sure was that the next morning I would wake up feeling crippled by whatever I had revealed, the shame already settling over me before I even opened my eyes.

There is something undeniably seductive about the “that would only happen to you” girl. People are drawn to her because she makes life feel briefly less dull. She is the girl everybody turns toward at dinner. The one whose stories get repeated later. Attention accumulates around her almost automatically and for a while, it feels a lot like love.

But eventually those same people begin using that version of you against you. Ordinary mistakes, the kind most human beings make constantly and are usually allowed to recover from, start hardening into evidence of some deeper personal defect. Getting too drunk at a party. Sleeping through something important. Getting fired. Getting broken up with. Having a panic attack in public. All of it becomes absorbed into this larger mythology of who you are: unstable and incapable of handling your own life. And suddenly you are no longer allowed the full range of normal human emotion. You cannot be sad or angry or overwhelmed without it becoming further proof of your instability. Because you created the character first. Because even you admitted that was who you were.

At a certain point I was forced to realize that I’d spent years volunteering myself for the role of the jester, confusing being entertaining with being loved. And there was no real reason the role had to belong to me. I’d built entire social interactions around anticipating other peoples boredom, arriving prepared to perform before anybody even asked me to. Compliments were immediately dissolved into jokes and every insecurity of mine became material. Somewhere along the way I began mistaking self deprecation for honesty. But being funny does not mean reducing yourself into something smaller and easier to consume. Maybe that’s what growing up actually is: learning to leave something of yourself, for yourself.

crooked

corrected itself in laughter

most often at me

diminishing myself.

your lashes

that thick

enviable fringe

always lowered

in withdrawal

when I spoke.

and your hair—

a golden mop

taking the light

shampooed in

scotch and

something sickly

some evidence of

a better

life.

I miss the way you turned toward me

in the night. the room rinsed

streetlight blue.

you didn’t wake

only reached for me

as though I were a habit

something you do

while thinking of something

else.

I do not miss your alarm—

that thin scream of morning

or the sound of your belt

the metallic certainty

of it fastening

more final

than anything you

ever offered.

You were already gone

even inside of me

you were leaving.

“This is one of the best dates I’ve had in awhile,” he said, his blonde hair falling in sections over his forehead.

It was my idea to leave the city. To rent a car and drive out to a Montauk for a middle of the week getaway. We both worked from home, and my situationship (who was thirty-three but operated with the vague schedule of a college sophomore) was free enough to disappear for a few days.

It was also my idea to bring my favorite book of short stories to the beach. When Watched, by Leopoldine Core.

He listened so carefully. That was the surprising part. At one of the stories, he actually started tearing up. He said it reminded him of something from his childhood that he didn’t feel like explaining. I didn’t press. It felt like enough just to sit there beside him while the light drained from the sky.

I remember thinking, with this sudden, almost frightening certainty: this is what love is supposed to feel like. Reading something beautiful to someone while the sun dissolves into the ocean. For a moment, it even made me forget about my last situationship, who we’ll call Luke.

I fell for Luke, who was 6’2 and boyishly handsome, on a road trip we took upstate in his big, beaten-down pickup truck. The road trip was a premature idea. I’d proposed it to him sometime around 3 a.m., drunk, during the strange confessional window that opens during pillow talk.

The drive was three hours. We spent most of it listening to Lana Del Rey while I asked him questions about his life in the investigative, romantic way you interrogate someone when you’ve already decided you like them.

“This is actually pretty good,” he said at one point when we put on Radio, as if surprised that a song could exist that met his approval.

The questions I asked supplied the script: how he hated the social life at Wesleyan, the ice-fishing trip he’d taken in Alaska with his dad, the story of how when he was a little kid he attempted to hitchhike home from sleep away camp in Maine.

I could have listened to him talk for hours, not because what he was saying was especially fascinating (it wasn’t), but because when you like someone that much, the experience of watching them get animated produces this intoxicating sense of intimacy. Like he will remember you specifically as the person he told these things to.

For the remaining three hours of the ride, and really the whole weekend in Hudson, he didn’t ask me a single question about my life.

If it isn’t already obvious, these guys, and the ones who came after them, never turned into my official boyfriends, which at the time felt devastating. It’s so hard to mourn something that never fully formed. They never lasted long enough to build the usual architecture of a breakup. Just a handful of moments. Little honeymoon fragments that seemed to exist slightly outside of time: a night out that felt electric, a long conversation that tricked you into believing you had discovered something rare and profound in another person, the brief glowing stretch where everything still feels possible. And in some ways those fragments were worse because of their brevity. They ended before anything disappointing had the chance to creep in, before the small dull frictions that slowly expose two people as human.

Which means the memories stayed polished, untouched. And so afterward you find yourself repeating the familiar, humiliating sentences people say when something ends before they’re ready for it to: But what about that day on the beach when we read together and he fell asleep in the sun? What about the road trip, the inside jokes? We had so much fun. We laughed constantly. We did all these things.

Of course, most of those activities had been planned by me. The traditions too: small rituals I introduced and then decided were meaningful to the both of us.

I am, by default, someone who likes to make people laugh. I like making other people feel comfortable, like they’ve stepped into a place where everything has already been arranged for them. I plan things. I show people the architecture of my inner life—my favorite movies, the books I love, the restaurants I insist we try. I’m always trying to make sure there isn’t a dead moment, not that stretch of silence where two people suddenly realize they don’t actually have much to say to each other, or anything in common.

If you’ve read my writing before, you’ll know I also have the unfortunate habit of making jokes at my own expense, which is a trait I’m currently attempting, (without success) to retire.

One of my other unfortunate habits is my ability to romanticize things that are, objectively, not really that romantic. People who, if you were to examine them from a neutral third party perspective, would register as mid in every conceivable way.

What I didn’t realize until much later in life is that it’s actually not that hard to get attached to someone. Or to convince yourself they’re amazing, and that what you’re feeling must therefore be love. The mind is extremely cooperative when it comes to constructing these little romantic narratives. All it really takes is a handful of perfectly timed moments: someone who looks at you a certain way, laughs at your jokes, someone who appears, for a brief but intoxicating stretch of time, perfectly in sync with you.

Or maybe he does none of these things, maybe he just tells you something that seems vaguely vulnerable (like admitting he had no friends in college), and instead of registering this as a man simply talking out loud, you interpret it as intimacy.

No one is really above this impulse. No one is immune to getting attached quickly, to being seduced by these tiny cinematic scenes that feel bigger than they actually are. Reading to someone on a beach while the sun is setting. Laughing at a stupid joke. Enjoying a good meal together. These moments are small in reality, but in your head they expand until they feel like evidence of something huge. Like the beginning of a love story, one that could maybe last forever.

When these so-called perfect connections end, we spend a humiliating amount of time performing forensic analysis on the relationship. Why did he leave? What went wrong? What moment, exactly, caused the collapse? As if there must have been some tiny hinge on which the entire relationship swung open and then shut. What we almost never ask is: were they really that special, or was I just very good at making ordinary moments feel special? What actually was the relationship?

Not the version we constructed out of late night conversations and selective memory, but the literal reality of it. What did this person actually add to your life that wasn’t already there? What part of your daily existence became richer, smarter, kinder, more interesting—rather than simply… emotionally stimulating?

And sometimes, if you’re being brutally honest, the answer is uncomfortable in a different way. Because occasionally the magic you remember, the sense that everything felt heightened and cinematic, wasn’t something they were bringing into your life at all. It was something you were supplying.

You were the one narrating it all in your head. Filling in the pauses. Editing the night into something with shape. A passing comment suddenly felt revealing. A mildly attentive man became mysterious and emotionally complex.

The other day my friend got ghosted by the guy she’d been in a situationship with for about four months, and whom she was (at least from the outside), madly in love with. Every conversation eventually circled back to him, like he was the center of everything she was thinking about.

In my opinion, he brought absolutely nothing to the table. Not in the petty way people say that when they think their friends deserve better, but in the very literal sense that if you wrote down his qualities on paper, the list would be…short.

He looked like every other finance boy on Hinge. The exact same haircut, the same Patagonia fleece. He almost never asked her questions about herself, her family, her dreams or her life. Every dinner they went to was at a restaurant she had suggested, because he apparently possessed no ideas for dates of his own, or perhaps no interest in having them.

I listened to her for hours as she vented and cried. “But we had so much fun together,” she kept repeating.

To which I kept replying: “That’s because you, yourself, are fun.”

Relationships can sometimes be pure projection. Which is why they’re so easy to exist inside of when the other person isn’t actually contributing very much, when someone else (often you) is doing the labor that makes the whole thing feel alive: planning the dates, asking the questions, telling the jokes, injecting the energy that gives the situation its little sparks of life.

As women we’re particularly susceptible to romanticizing what is, when you step back, the absolute bare minimum. Small, ordinary human behaviors that we then inflate into signs of destiny. He liked the song I showed him, and later I saw him add it to his playlist. Which my brain immediately translates into: we share a soul.

Or we have an inside joke; never mind that I was the one who invented it. Or we spend a whole night dancing under a disco ball in some overheated Manhattan club in July. And because the night itself was electric, because the music was loud and the air was warm and everyone looked a little bit beautiful in the flashing lights, we start to believe that the electricity must have come from the relationship. We don’t think for a second that it came from the setting. Or from us.

A few months ago my mom admitted that when she met Luke, in passing, when he was helping me pack up my apartment before I moved, she hadn’t found him remarkable at all. In fact, she thought he was very average. She just didn’t want to hurt my feelings at the time.

And this is the strange thing about love: or what we sometimes call love: Two people can look at the exact same man and see entirely different creatures.

To me he was a once in a lifetime find. To her he was a placeholder in skinny jeans.

Which makes you wonder, not really about him, but about where the magic in that relationship was actually coming from. Because sometimes the person we’re mourning isn’t remarkable at all.

Sometimes the remarkable thing was simply the way we were looking at them.

The internet reacted with outrage. On TikTok, thousands of women and men who had once looked at Chalamet with reverence posted videos mourning the fall of yet another soft-spoken indie boyfriend.

“RIP Timothée Chalamet,” the comments read. “You would’ve hated Timothée Chalamet.”

Like a lot of people, I’ve been a fan for years. Ever since I first watched Call Me by Your Name, Chalamet with those endless blue eyes and that fragile, boyish charm that made him look like he might shatter under direct sunlight. Or later in Beautiful Boy, where he played a drug addict with a twitchy, haunted precision that made it hard to remember he was acting at all.

It didn’t hurt that he felt familiar. The sort of boy who looked like someone you might have known in high school—just slightly more beautiful and cinematic. I adored him for the same reasons most people did: the talent, the softness of his features, the strange musicality of the way he speaks in interviews. He seemed sensitive, passionate, and hungry. Which is why so many people were disappointed by the comment. Because to equate popularity and profitability with excellence is a pretty lazy way to think about art. I would much rather read something brilliant that sold a few thousand copies than something mediocre that sold five million. Great work has always existed on the margins; strange, niche, difficult things that only a small audience initially understands.

But the logic behind Chalamet’s comment did not feel like a thoughtful critique of culture, but a bro-ish shrug, the implication being: those things don’t make money, so clearly no one cares.

Maybe that’s genuinely how he thinks. When you’ve spent your entire adult life inside an industry where success is measured in box office numbers, contracts, magazine covers, metrics that can be ranked, it becomes very easy to start believing that money and visibility are the only things that matter.

And it’s also possible that something subtler happens once someone reaches a certain level of fame. Oscar level fame, the kind that lifts you out of ordinary rooms and drops you exclusively among the mega mega rich—people who are, in many cases, even richer than yourself. At that point the social gravity changes. Consciously or not, you begin absorbing the values of whatever new orbit you’re moving in. The incentives shift and suddenly the question of what matters becomes framed less around curiosity or art and more around profitability and audience reach.

Chalamet, interestingly, has spent his life moving through a series of identities that mirror these different worlds. First the sensitive downtown art kid, looking at wealth and celebrity slightly from the outside. Then someone who begins brushing up against it, dating people like Lourdes Leon, drifting closer to the social and cultural machinery that surrounds fame. And eventually the full insider, the person who is no longer observing the system but operating comfortably inside of it.

Which means that over time, sometimes without anyone noticing the exact moment it happens, the definition of value begins to change. Profitability starts to feel like proof of relevance, and mass appeal begins to look like the truest form of cultural success. And once that shift happens it becomes easy to look at something like ballet or opera and see only its declining viewership rather than the centuries of artistic tradition that made the industry you now dominate possible in the first place.

Actors, especially extremely famous ones, aren’t exactly living in the same ecosystem as most artists. They’re not part of the world of dancers, musicians, composers, painters, and writers who spend years struggling to keep fragile art forms alive with very little financial reward.

Yes, it’s true that certain forms like opera and ballet are somewhat imperiled today. Cultural tastes have shifted. Philanthropic support has changed. The economics are different than they were a century ago.

But acknowledging that reality is very different from dismissing those traditions entirely.

Because the fact that something is less profitable, or less popular, doesn’t make it less meaningful. And it definitely doesn’t make it disposable.

A friend of mine recently dated an actor who, like Chalamet, (who the internet insists on comparing him to), specialized in playing these fragile, tragic characters in indie films. In interviews he had the same slightly rumpled, indie boy demeanor, so naturally she assumed he must be a genuinely thoughtful, curious person.

But very quickly she realized that offscreen he was not like that at all.

He didn’t read books. He didn’t watch films unless someone else put one on. He didn’t really seem to have original thoughts about much of anything. When she suggested going to the The MET he shrugged and said it was “kind of boring.”

Most nights were spent his phone watching mind numbing reels or playing video games with the volume blasting like a twelve year old boy at a sleepover.

And when they did watch movies together, his preferred selections were things like Jackass 2, Batman, or, his personal favorite, rewatching random scenes from Sharknado on YouTube.

At one point he attended an awards show and, while walking the red carpet, was asked the standard celebrity question about his top 3 favorite films. He proudly listed the last three movies he and my friend had watched together while extremely high and horizontal on a Sunday afternoon a week before. Paul Blart: Mall Cop, Rio, and Mean Girls.

The internet described this list as “random” and “unexpected,” which, for him, somehow became its own kind of compliment. Fans were charmed by the idea that he had such quirky, unpredictable taste. Articles framed it as an adorable insight into the mind of a creative eccentric—evidence, apparently, of his whimsical relationship to culture. But the truth was much less interesting. Those were just the last three movies he had seen.

Despite being a very talented actor, he did not have a favorite movie. He preferred being on his phone, watching reels or sending memes in his group chat. It soon became clear that he was not the strange, bookish intellectual his fans, or my friend ,imagined. He was just an ordinary guy whose primary interests appeared to be sex, fame, and money.

His fans and my friend had cast him in a role he wasn’t actually playing in real life, and he was letting them believe it. But actors are not the characters they play. A person delivering beautiful lines written by someone else does not necessarily mean they spend their afternoons contemplating the fate of high art. Sometimes it simply means they memorized the script well and delivered the lines convincingly. And maybe that’s the real issue here: we keep mistaking aesthetic sensitivity for actual sensitivity, forgetting that someone can have a tragic face, speak gently, star in beautiful films, and still say something astonishingly tone deaf in an interview.

In the age of social media—where every interview clip is dissected, zoomed in on, turned into a viral personality test—people have become parasocial toward celebrities to a degree that is, in my opinion, pretty bizarre.

When we find out that someone famous is arrogant, rude, or morally questionable, it lands like a personal betrayal, a stab to the chest. How could someone making millions of dollars a year, surrounded exclusively by yes-men, existing inside an industry where the rules of ordinary life don’t apply, possibly turn out arrogant, out of touch, or misogynistic?

When Chalamet began dating Kylie Jenner, fans were shocked, disoriented by the paring. To many people online, it felt aesthetically and intellectually mismatched. Out of all the interesting, talented, mysterious women in the world… why a Kardashian?

The internet quickly sorted the relationship into two opposing categories: sophisticated versus superficial. Cinema versus reality television. Depth versus no depth.

But when people dug deeper, they noticed a pattern.

Long before he was famous, Chalamet dated Lourdes Leon in high school, the daughter of Madonna. Later he dated Lily Rose Depp, herself the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis.

Which begins to suggest a pattern, not necessarily sinister or evil, but certainly strategic. Not the romantic wandering of a tortured artist searching for some mysterious soulmate, but something much more familiar in Hollywood: proximity to power, fame, and the right rooms.

So why, then, is everyone acting so heartbroken that this type of person can so casually dismiss two of the most beautiful art forms in history? Art forms that have survived for centuries. Art forms that require almost superhuman discipline, physical sacrifice, and years of devotion just to reach a level of competence most of us will never come close to.

And he says this, of course, from inside an industry that routinely spends hundreds of millions of dollars on glossy sets, CGI sandstorms, and actors being paid eight figures to read lines someone else wrote.

Personally, I find something far more moving when I go to the ballet and watch these impossibly elongated, otherworldly dancers glide across the stage. The backdrop is painted in lush colors, the orchestra swells, the costumes shimmer under the lights. It’s delicate and beautiful and fleeting in a way that film rarely is. It makes me emotional.

What doesn’t make me emotional is watching Chalamet in Dune staring solemnly into the desert while a Hans Zimmer soundtrack vibrates the walls of the theater.

This isn’t meant to be a hit piece against Chalamet. If anything, it says more about us, about the strange, devotional level of parasocial attachment we’ve collectively developed toward celebrities.

We watch their movies, then their interviews, then the press tours that accompany the movies, and eventually the press tours about the press tours. We study their facial expressions, searching for subtext in a slightly awkward laugh. We begin to assemble, piece by piece, a version of them that feels intimate.

And before long, these people who are, in reality, strangers, become something deeper. They become boyfriends, role models, moral authorities. Figures we feel we know deeply, despite the fact that we have never met them and probably never will.

We assume that someone who plays an intellectual poet must be intellectual themselves, when in reality they might not have read a book since high school. That someone capable of portraying a devastated, heartbroken lover on screen must therefore possess emotional depth in real life.

But someone can deliver a beautiful monologue about love and loss on screen and then go home and treat their wife terribly, (and they often do). They can convincingly embody sensitivity, vulnerability and brilliance, while privately being an arrogant asshole.

So maybe the solution isn’t to keep building them into moral authorities, only to feel betrayed when they disappoint us. Maybe the healthier approach would be to enjoy them for what they provide: a comfort movie, a catchy song, something fun to watch on a plane or stream on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

We can appreciate celebrities the way we appreciate any other form of entertainment.

So let’s stop being disappointed that an actor casually dismissed ballet or opera, and be disappointed in ourselves for expecting a movie star, raised inside one of the most self congratulatory industries on earth, to have particularly thoughtful opinions about art in the first place.

If there is one thing to take from this essay, it’s probably this: stop looking to Hollywood actors or influencers or pop stars for intellectual insight, kindness or depth. Don’t keep idolizing the people who have been most aggressively marketed to you. Instead, go toward the art that asks more of you.

Dig a little deeper. Find the art forms people like Chalamet think don’t matter. The stranger, older, more difficult things. The things that require patience.

Because those are usually the ones worth keeping.

He wasn’t what I imagined my first love would be. Looking back, I’m not really sure he was. He had big brown eyes and a softness about him that read as sweetness more than desire. He wasn’t charismatic or loud, he existed slightly outside the center of social gravity, hovering at the edges of rooms rather than anchoring them. And still, I loved him.

For the first time, I was with a guy who didn’t treat me as something disposable. I wasn’t a body borrowed for the night and then forgotten. He told me he loved me. We texted constantly. We slept pressed together in his dorm room, living inside a loop of hazy, interchangeable days: movies, weed, dinners out, frat basements and hangovers.

And yet there was something in him I could never quite reach. Sometimes it felt like there was nothing behind his eyes at al, a sort of sealed neutrality. When I introduced him to my friends he would sit quietly, staring into space, contributing nothing. When I tried to talk to him about my writing or my ambition or the future or about us, he would pause for a long time, searching for words that either came very slowly or too late. I remember telling friends how badly I wanted to shake him, to crack him open and locate whatever it was he was withholding. Or maybe there was nothing hidden. Maybe this was just who he was. That possibility, that there was no deeper layer to uncover, felt scarier than the idea of a secret.

After nine months together, during finals week, he texted and told me to meet him on the quad. There was no preamble. When I arrived, he stood with his hands in his pockets and told me he was done. His heart had, apparently, been out of it for weeks. My body reacted before my mind could assemble meaning. I cried, publicly and humiliatingly while reminding him that, three days ago precisely we had mapped out the entire summer together. His face stayed flat, almost bored. It was clear he’d exited the relationship somewhere private and orderly weeks before. What remained was just the formality of letting me know.

I kept returning to that sealed part of him, the place I’d never quite been able to access. I wondered if the ending had been embedded in the relationship from the start. Years later, reading Belle Burden’s bestselling, poignant memoir Strangers, I felt the same recognition. Burden writes about her seemingly solid marriage to husband James a steady, successful man with whom she shares three children. Just days into COVID lockdown, she learns he’s been having an affair. Instead of apologizing or explaining, he packs a bag and tells her she can keep the house and have custody of the kids. And then he leaves, exiting their twenty-year marriage with the efficiency of someone completing a transaction. Overnight, the man she thought she knew becomes a stranger, shrugging off their shared life like an outfit that no longer fits. Burden writes: “I was conscious that there was a piece of him that I couldn’t quite reach… I liked this, the unknown piece. It felt sexy.”

We’re taught now to watch for obvious red flags in relationships: jealousy disguised as protectiveness, secrecy around phones, wandering eyes, negging, sketchy social media activity. These are all behavioral. What stayed with me was something less easy to spot: emotional neutrality. The sense that there is something about your significant other you don’t quite know and can’t quite reach, a wall that never breaks down. I began to wonder if the most dangerous red flag is the one that never waves. The partner who is kind and consistent enough but completely sealed off. The person who participates without ever fully entering.

A few years ago, I dated a guy who arrived quickly and confidently, the way love stories are supposed to begin. After only a handful of dates, he told me he loved me and wanted me to be his girlfriend. We traveled to Europe together. He took me to glamorous parties and folded me into his circle of beautiful, interesting friends. It was fast and excessive, but didn’t true love sometimes work out that way? Still, there was a part of him I couldn’t reach. Every so often, an expression would cross his face, something vacant. His eyes would go flat, like a room briefly emptied. When I asked deeper questions, about intimacy or the future, his answers were strangely impersonal, as if lifted from a brochure. Once, while we were watching a movie, I asked if there was anything about him I didn’t know. (I think I was o test the limits of him, to see if there was more).

“I don’t know,” he said, and went back to watching Batman 2.

Four months later he broke up with me over the phone, seemingly out of nowhere. It ended the way the college relationship had, the way so many of them do: as Burden writes, he was mine one day, and then he wasn’t. Whatever intimacy I thought we were building never deepened into anything real. It stayed flat and suspended. I never reached him.

Another guy came into my life not long after. He was gorgeous, successful and seemed to fall in love with me immediately. So I did what I always do in those moments: collapsed the future inward, deciding he was my forever.

One night at a Super Bowl party in his apartment, I looked across the room and caught something in his expression I still struggle to describe. While everyone was laughing and chatting, he was staring into space, his eyes completely empty. It wasn’t anger or sadness, just absence. Like watching someone step out of themselves. Later that night, I called a friend.

“He has that look” I said. “That weird, empty gaze I saw in (—-).”

Three months later, I went through his phone while he slept. I found conversations with strangers on dating apps and evidence of a weekend with his ex during a trip he’d said was for work.

Looking back across my relationships, I find myself cataloging them differently, on whether that feeling of unknowability was present or not. The sense of circling a perimeter I was never allowed to cross. As a dating columnist and content creator and as someone reckoning with her own patterns, I’ve come to think of this as a different kind of red flag. Not chaos or drama but emotional inaccessibility.

What complicates this is that naming the discomfort risks sounding paranoid. Like inventing problems where there are none. So the feeling gets swallowed. You tell yourself intimacy doesn’t mean total access and that everyone is entitled to interiority, that calm is the goal. And then I think about women like Belle, women with shared mortgages and children and decades of history, who recognize that same unknowability only in retrospect, once it’s too late.

I’d never been able to name the feeling, which may have been part of the feeling itself: the sense of living beside someone rather than with them. You can know a person’s routines, their preferences, the way they take their coffee or the shape of their anger or calm and still feel in some unprovable way that there’s an inner room you’re never invited into. How common is this? How many women move through relationships with this exact feeling of uncertainty, telling themselves it’s maturity or privacy or respect for boundaries, when in fact it’s distance? How many people, lovers or friends, are capable of maintaining a sealed version of themselves; a locked room they never open, not even after years, not even to the person sleeping beside them? The father to their children?

And if they can do this, if they can remain partially undisclosed for that long, what does intimacy even mean?

Not every quiet person is dangerous or withholding something catastrophic. But there’s a difference between privacy and absence, and the body seems to know that difference long before the mind is willing to articulate it.

My current boyfriend doesn’t have that unreachable quality. There is no sealed room I can sense but not enter. When I ask questions, he answers them and when something is wrong, it appears out in the open. He is kind, patient and, once upon a time, might have bored me. Now, that lack of edge feels like a total relief.

What I’m learning is that the feelings we dismiss as irrational are often our earliest forms of knowledge. That wanting access doesn’t make you insecure and asking to be known (and to know in return), is not unreasonable. It might just be the most basic requirement of intimacy there is.

Sensitive men read as safe, evolved, feminist-approved—the antidote to frat bros and finance guys. We don’t want the alpha; we want the poet in skinny jeans, the guywho listens to Elliott Smith, the one who blames his inability to commit on that one girl who broke his heart when he was twelve. We convince ourselves that tears are proof of goodness, when really they’re just proof of plumbing.

Up until very recently, I had a zero-tolerance policy toward cheating. I used to judge women who went back to cheaters: girls from college, coworkers, all making the shocking choice to return to men who publicly and repeatedly humiliated them. There was one in particular (let’s call her Claire) whose boyfriend betrayed her with such rigor and regularity it was basically a side hustle. Random club make outs, emotional affairs, DMs multiplying like gnats. She knew, and she stayed.

“She’s doing it to herself,” I’d say, smug on my moral high ground.

“You don’t get it,” a friend told me. “Until you’ve been cheated on, you don’t understand.”

A few years ago, I met the guy I thought I’d marry. He was handsome in a JFK Jr. way—wealthy but low key (trust-fund, tattered-tee style), and for once, mom and dad approved. After years of dating every beanie wearing Dimes Square drummer in the city, I finally found someone who didn’t fist bump my parents hello. It felt like everything I’d been manifesting for myself since I was twelve, and the first few months were pure bliss. He praised my writing, my hair, my body, my style with unprompted, poetic specificity. On my birthday, he sent three dozen roses and a handwritten love letter, telling me my smile could save the world. Never a flicker of irritation—just mutual adoration. I thought fate had finally arrived. That all the men before him had been training wheels for this: this spectacular, cinematic love.

Month four, over an Omakase dinner, his phone lit up with a notification from Telegram (basically the Silk Road of messaging apps—never a good sign), and he quickly flipped it over, face down on the table, and gave me a long, plunging kiss.

Later, when he was asleep, I typed in his extremely creative password (1234—don’t ask how I knew) and opened Pandora’s inbox. What I found was not just shocking, it was heartbreaking. There were hotel meetups, wire transfers, women named “Baby V,” OnlyFans receipts, exchanges of explicit photos with strangers. It wasn’t simple cheating—it took operational expertise.

I confronted him expecting anger, denial, gaslighting. Instead, he shrank. And then the sobs came. Not mine…his. Not just a tear or two: convulsing, fetal position, choking on apologies. He cited childhood trauma, his dad’s affairs, being bullied in middle school. Then sex addiction. Then a borderline personality disorder he’d forgotten to mention. His desire to ruin something because he felt I was so good, he didn’t deserve it. His long pattern of self-destruction, how much he hated himself, how he woke up most mornings in a stew of despair.

His pain was so apparent, I convinced myself it meant something. His tears indicated remorse, and remorse meant he was not a bad person—just a damaged one.

It became frustratingly hard to label him as a narcissist or manipulator—not because the facts didn’t line up (they did)—but because his vulnerability was so obvious that doubting it felt cruel, like a slur. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t neg me, didn’t insult my intelligence or call me “crazy” or “overbearing” (classic moves in the narcissist’s playbook). He was unerringly gentle—something that had drawn me to him in the first place. He didn’t even do the thing where he turned my justified anger about his cheating into an argument about my violating his boundaries, an “invasion of privacy.” Instead, he gave me a narrative. A trauma. Suddenly, the story was no longer “look what I did to you,” but “look what’s been done to me.”

Love can sometimes be pure projection, a theoretical exercise. So I found myself, for the first time ever, abandoning any logical response to his betrayal (rage, boundaries, blocking him on everything and never speaking to him again) in favor of compassion. I assume that’s also what Claire did, if I had to guess. You find yourself transmuting the pain of betrayal into a desperate need to become the nurse, the fixer, the one who finally heals the broken boy inside the man who just slept with someone else in a Marriott in midtown at two o’clock in the afternoon. I didn’t see it for what it was (a performance, a deflection) but as a cry for help. His tears, shaking hands, panic attacks, self-loathing—it was all so believable, so convincingly human. I was paralyzed by his pain.

Enter covert narcissism: the most dangerous type of manipulation. It’s not the overtly sociopathic kind we all know well, but the kind that weaponizes pity and uses your compassion against you. The kind that doesn’t say, “You’re crazy,” but “Please try and understand me.” It’s the kind that invites you to sit in the wreckage it caused and then makes you feel guilty for wanting to leave. Because what kind of monster walks away from someone so obviously broken?

After I caught him, he spiraled into depression: no eating, no sleeping, no gym—basically a doomsday scenario. I spoon-fed him courage, nursed him back to life, and burned myself out in the process. And when he finally emerged, he told me I was “the one.” That I’d broken the cycle.

My friends were understandably baffled—perturbed by the fact that I was still in a relationship with this supervillain. I had become that girl. The girl we used to talk about in half-whispers over martinis, our performative concern masking our snark: Can you believe she’s still with him? And yet here I was, embodying the very person I used to judge.

I told them I was “figuring it out” and promised I would break up with him eventually. But when two weeks turned into a month and I was still blissfully floating on like nothing had happened, they staged an intervention.

It wasn’t about how much I loved him, it was about my health, they insisted. He was clearly reckless in his choices. Why did I want to be with someone who looked me in the face and lied, even if by omission? Who cared why he did what he did? Didn’t I want my wedding guests to be happy for me, not pity me? I told myself they didn’t get it—they hadn’t seen him sob in my lap for hours about his father (or his mother, or his shame, or the puppy that died when he was three—the narratives blurred; the rationalizations became more elaborate). They didn’t know that I was his last tether to this cruel world.

I left the hangout feeling angry. Not just at them, but at how small and exposed I felt. I went straight to his place. And when he fell asleep, I did the thing I told myself I wouldn’t do again: I checked his phone. (The fact that he made it so easy raised another set of questions.) Lo and behold, Tinder was redownloaded, and texts with women were in his “recently deleted.” All those tears, those panic attacks, those speeches about being broken, his tearful gratitude for me saving him—just gambits to buy more time.

I see this play out constantly with my friends and their boyfriends. Just last week, a friend called me in a fit of frustration. Her seven-month situationship, who had already told her he loved her, still wouldn’t commit to being exclusive. By the end of the call, she was fired up.

“You’re right, I’m going to end it,” she said, after my much-needed tough-love pep talk. Finally, I thought. Breakthrough.

An hour later, I called back, ready for a victory lap. Instead, she answered her phone with a lilt in her voice—not the energy of a woman who’d just dumped her man-child.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He started crying,” she said, compassion as thick as honey. She launched into his sob story about the girl who “ruined love” for him freshman year. (He’s thirty-five, by the way.)

I knew exactly what had happened: he’d used tears as his get-out-of-jail-free card. And it worked. Even my brilliant, stubborn friend folded.

While women who cry are seen as needy, manipulative, unstable, and, most of all, annoying, we’re taught, by cultural tropes, books, and movies, that a crying man is a rare and profound creature, sensitive and brave. And depending on the context, that can be true. Emotional depth and vulnerability in men should be cherished.

The problem is, the moment he starts crying, we stop thinking. We assume his emotions are raw and real, not strategic. But here’s the truth: some men—especially narcissistic or emotionally manipulative ones—rely on our empathy to get away with bad behavior. They know we’ll second guess ourselves the moment they show us pain.

Tears are easy, Change is hard. And too often, we want to believe that the tears mean something, because believing otherwise means confronting the harder truth: that some people cry not because they’re good, but because they’re human, and humanity has never been synonymous with goodness.

So hold onto your empathy, girls. And the next time someone who betrayed you tries to weep their way out of trouble, head straight for the exits.

For most of my life, I believed that men wanted a girl who wasn’t like other girls. You know the type: the enigmatic, artistic, hopelessly tragic kind of girl who could quote Joan Didion from memory and leave parties at exactly the right cinematic moment. The girl who made him feel like he was seeing something no one else could.

Depending on who you asked, “not like other girls” could mean almost anything. Sometimes it’s code for self destructive, sometimes for clever or mysterious. For me, it meant filling notebooks with movie lines that hurt in ways I couldn’t explain or staying up until 3 a.m with boys who thought Dostoevsky was a vodka brand. I’d read them my poetry out loud, my voice shaking, drunk or drugged out enough to think it mattered, hoping that saying something true would make me unforgettable. They’d look at me the way you look at a screensaver—pretty, moving, meaningless. I mistook that look for fascination, when it was really just attention. And attention, I have since realized, is the cheapest form of intimacy.

I wanted, desperately, to be understood by these boys, of all people. Or maybe I just wanted to captivate them. These boys with their golden mops of hair, their hoodies that smelled like weed and detergent, their jeans slung low enough to reveal the elastic bandof their boxers. I wanted them to see and know my depth: the entire internal architecture of my being.

What I didn’t understand then (and maybe still don’t) is that most men aren’t looking to encounter an inner world. These same men have now fallen in love with their AI chat bots, leaving their sweet wives for code that flatters them. Finally, a woman who will never interrupt, never contradict, never drift away. The dream girlfriend: compliant, responsive, infinitely available, so safely unreal.

Dating, when you really think about it, is just another performance. You play your part, gauge the audience’s reaction, adjust accordingly. The tragedy is when the audience doesn’t understand the art. Girls like me (and maybe you, if you’re still here), get cast as too much: too intense, too self aware, too unwilling to edit ourselves down for approval. But too much usually just means requires thought. And for most men, thought is labor. They would rather consume than engage.

In my early twenties, I couldn’t understand why I had such shit luck with men. People told me I was overthinking it. You? they’d laugh. You’re beautiful, stylish, funny. As if being pretty exempted you from confusion or pain. What they didn’t see was what happened after midnight—me cueing up my favorite 90s indie film, making them watch the parts that made me feel something, wanting to talk about it all after. I could feel their patience thinning, like oxygen leaving the room. Waiting for me to finish, to quiet down, so they could hit it and go to sleep.

When they ghosted or ended things with me, I assumed it was because I’d said too much, felt too much, demanded too much. Now I think it’s because I made them think at all.

And maybe that’s why so many men leave their wives for younger, quieter women—now, even for AI bots. Not because those girls are prettier or more interesting or more intelligent (they rarely are), but because they’re easier. Easier to impress, easier to manage, easier to believe. A twenty three year old isn’t going to ask a fifty two year old about his taxes or his conscience. She’ll smile, nod, and let him think he’s profound. The fantasy isn’t youth, it’s ease.

The younger woman reflects them back as wise, strong, still capable of seduction. She’ll laugh at the right times, pretend not to notice the small cruelties. Everyone gets what they want: he feels important, she feels chosen. Until she doesn’t. Until she asks one question too many and he replaces her with someone who won’t.

I used to think the tragedy was that men didn’t understand women like me. Now I think it’s how desperately I wanted to be understood by them at all. The years I spent trying to prove my inner world existed to someone who found depth disorienting. Maybe that’s why you’re single, too: because you haven’t learned the script yet. Be lighter, be easier, be so, so much less. What passes for affection or love now is often just the reward for being easy or palatable. There are good men, of course, but when you’re young, you don’t really meet them. You meet the ones who don’t get you, because you’re still mistaking chemistry for compatibility.

Here’s my tip: stop giving men access to your inner world, or trying to prove you have one. Instead, start looking for men who aren’t afraid to talk about things that are difficult, who don’t rush you into bed, who don’t want to consume you, but get to know you. Once you stop settling for the boys who are beautiful but empty, you’ll learn that real intimacy isn’t really cinematic, It looks a lot like being seen without having to perform.

I’d always believed that having a boyfriend drained you of something essential. It dulled the edges. Made you slower, softer, less ambitious, less hot. Boyfriends, in my experience, were people who rearranged your energy until you could no longer recognize yourself. Lazy, lying creatures who fed off the women around them. Energy vampires, I used to call them. I never posted them—because why memorialize something you already know will end? Love, for me, was a trick. Something I was too self aware to survive.

In the past two years, I’ve had three boyfriends, which feels like a lot for someone who used to think she was destined to die alone. In the first draft of this essay, I went through each one, listing their crimes and the many ways they dulled me. But after launching a tell-all podcast episode about one of them (the actor), I’m exhausted by my own past. I don’t even care anymore. They all proved the same thing: boyfriends don’t always make you happier; sometimes they make you want to die. If he’s a loser, you become one too. If he’s lazy, you start to rot. If he cheats, lies, or negs you, congratulations, you’re sleeping with the enemy.

Still, I’ll touch on the last two: the one before this, and the one now. The one before—we fell in love instantly. Within weeks, it felt like we’d both been drugged. I was back in bed at noon, smoking weed, half dreaming through the day. He’d stopped showing up anywhere: work, the gym, his life, and I did the same. We became that couple people hated. My friends thought I’d been kidnapped or joined a cult. Then one night when he was sleeping, I looked through his phone and found out he’d been cheating the whole time. I was back to hating men, and swore I would never have a boyfriend again. I was done.

A week later, I was back on Hinge. Everyone looked the same: men holding fish, men in Patagonia fleeces, men whose entire personality was “spicy margs.” They all blurred together, a composite sketch of someone I’d never want to meet. I swiped half heartedly until the faces stopped registering, then deleted the app again. A few days later, out of boredom, I redownloaded it. In my likes was a face that snagged something in me. His name was Alex, which was also my brother’s name. I stared at his picture, trying to place it. “You look crazy familiar,” I wrote.

His reply came hours later:
I think we went to tennis camp together in the Hamptons when we were ten. If that rings a bell

I was friends with your brother

And it did. It was like someone pressed play on an old tape. The Hamptons, 2009 summer. Back when boy bands like The Fray and Good Charlotte still played on the car radio. I could see him again: white polo, sunburn peeling at the bridge of his nose; the boy who never really looked at me but still made me blush down to my wrists whenever he came over after camp to play Nintendo Wii.

He had straight blonde hair and bright green eyes and was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. He loved sports cars and had a dachshund named Aston Martin. He was shy to the point of vanishing, rarely meeting my eyes. At some point, he and my brother lost touch, and I never saw him again. And now, almost twenty years later, here he was—still beautiful in that same quiet, unreachable way. It felt less like meeting someone new than recognizing a dream I’d forgotten I’d had. Two months later, he was my boyfriend, which felt like everything I had promised myself I would not do.

But things were different. He took things slow. He didn’t grab at me in restaurants or touch my waist without asking. He didn’t call me “babe,” didn’t flood my phone with hearts or empty compliments. He didn’t even kiss me on the first two dates. At first, I mistook his calmness for dullness. I’d been conditioned to expect fireworks: to confuse anxiety with chemistry, volatility with love. His steadiness unnerved me. There were no dizzying highs, no manic declarations. Just a quiet, persistent kind of care. He opened doors. Remembered my favorite kind of sushi and ordered it without asking. Planned small, tender things: drives upstate, early mornings, a movie he thought I’d like. He asked questions and actually listened to the answers. He didn’t talk about other women, didn’t make me feel like I had to compete for his attention. There was something strangely pure and old fashioned about him. He showed up when he said he would, went to work, came home tired but soft around the edges. Being with him was peaceful in a way that felt foreign, like I’d spent years standing too close to a fire, and now I was learning how to live in warmth instead.

I’m not here to sell my boyfriend to you, or brag, because I really hate that. I spent years scrolling through anniversary or valentines day posts, rolling my eyes, jaw tight, thinking, If I can’t be happy, why should anyone else? I prayed for couples to fall apart, convinced love was something glossy and hollow that only existed on Instagram. A year ago, I would’ve agreed that having a boyfriend was embarrassing. But now I don’t. Love isn’t embarrassing—real love isn’t, at least. It’s just rare. It doesn’t humiliate you or keep you guessing or make you feel crazy. Sometimes it’s quiet to the point of boredom, and that’s what makes it safe.

Maybe it’s not having a boyfriend that’s embarrassing—it’s the way we’ve normalized being with people who don’t even like us, and who we don’t really like either. Boyfriends have become less of a partnership and more of a prop: a brand extension, something to pose with instead of build with. We date people who don’t challenge us, don’t make us laugh, don’t make us think, because being alone feels harder than being disappointed. We stay in rooms that drain us because the silence outside them feels worse. Familiar pain becomes its own kind of comfort. We say yes when we mean maybe. We walk down aisles toward people we’re not sure about. We defend what hurts us, drift from our friends, throw pieces of our lives away for men who would never do the same. And when it all inevitably falls apart, we act like love itself betrayed us, instead of admitting we ignored the signs all along.

I reject the idea that we should coast by in a bitter, pessimistic state. There’s nothing shameful about being loved or wanting love, just like there’s nothing shameful about being alone. Love isn’t the enemy. It’s not something to mock or fear. You should always be happy for others when they have it. Let people post their partners. Let them have their moments, even if it doesn’t feel real to you. Don’t project, don’t judge, don’t turn someone else’s joy into proof of your cynicism. Love is a beautiful thing when it’s with someone who expands you, someone whose presence makes you more yourself. Maybe getting older is realizing that real love isn’t cinematic. It’s consistent. It’s kind. It’s safe. And that’s enough.

All her life, people told Jane she was pretty. Not gorgeous. Not striking. Just pretty, in a way that suggested she might’ve been more if she were taller, or thinner, or better dressed. Her face was balanced. Her eyes were the color of iced tea, and her hair, a soft strawberry blonde, never quite fell the way she wanted it to. She lived in a one bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with a guy named Tommy. They’d met at an off Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie. He played a minor character with major opinions.

It was a Saturday, just past noon, when Jane first noticed the couple who’d eventually become her favorite customers. The girl caught her eye first, tall in a way that made her seem unfinished, her limbs too long, her face improbably beautiful in that open, unformed way some people managed to stay. She wore oversized clothes that looked borrowed, sleeves swallowing her wrists, sweatpants sagging at the hips.. Jane assumed they belonged to the guy she was always there with. He had that slippery kind of hair that looked wet even when it wasn’t, and a body that suggested something violent, broad shoulders, hands that gripped everything too tightly. They came in together, always holding hands, kissing in line like no one else existed.

“Any shot you can fit us in?” The guy would ask, looking at Jane with a slightly flirtatious, slightly sinister gaze. And she always said she’d see what she could do, and somehow, they always ended up getting a table, and Jane always ended up serving them.

The guy always ordered the same thing: the burger, well done, with fries. The girl was never sure.

“I’ll have the burger too,” she’d say, soft and certain, until Jane was halfway to the kitchen. Then her voice again, calling her back.

“Actually, can I do the Greek salad? With grilled chicken?”

“Of course,” Jane would say, the polite smile she’d learned from the mirror still in place.

“But can you make sure the chicken is like… really well done?” the girl would add. “I have a fear of undercooked chicken.”

“Cooked to death,” Jane would say with a bright smile. “Got it.”

The couple always sat on the same side of the booth, pressed together like they couldn’t stand the space between them. They held hands under the table, stared into each other like they were watching a movie only they could see.

Jane found herself studying them. Not with envy exactly, more like curiosity. What it was to be that close to someone, to orbit them like a second sun. She’d had boyfriends, sure. Men who drifted in and out. None she’d loved enough to stop them. Except maybe Ronnie, back in college, another actor, pale and lanky and overly confident. He booked some small role in a huge movie and disappeared from her life like that was the whole point.

Jane figured the boyfriend of the girl must be rich, or came from the kind of family where money wasn’t something you had to think about. He always paid, always tipped too much, always smiled like he’d been trained to. The other servers noticed it too. The money, yes, but also the way the couple were together, how often they came in, how they kissed like no one was watching, how they curled into each other in the booth, laughing at things that didn’t seem funny. There was something about them that felt theatrical. Or maybe it was just youth, untouched by anything real yet.

After her shift, Jane looked them up online. The guy, it turned out, was the son of a hedge fund billionaire, according to Forbes. The girl was a model, though online she looked like someone else entirely. In the photos she appeared polished and glossy, with contoured cheekbones and voluminous hair. In person, however, she was always slumped in a hoodie, her hair matted in the back like it hadn’t been brushed in weeks. Pale, hungover, like the version of Jane who used to show up to class straight from Ronnie’s dorm room.

Ronnie.

She hadn’t thought about him in a while, and somehow she was always thinking about him. Was he still acting? Booking roles? Sometimes she checked his IMDB just to see if anything new was added, or watched his instagram stories from the burner account she made in 2021. She watched his girlfriend’s stories, too, blonde and polite looking, always tagging rehearsal selfies and yoga studios and vegan cafes.

A few weeks ago, there it was: the engagement post. A collaborative one.

Easiest yes of my life! the caption read. The photo was of the two of them kissing in Times Square, drenched in LED ads and tourist flashes. Jane had stared at it for a long time. It was so corny. So him.

The couple started coming in every day around noon, always looking vaguely disheveled. The girl never knew what she wanted to eat. Jane overheard her once, complaining that she felt fat.

“Get the pancakes if you want the pancakes, baby,” the guy said, voice low and amused.

“But I feel so obese” the girl said. “I should get the yogurt.”

“So get the yogurt.”

“But I want the pancakes!” She groaned.

He laughed, cupped her face like she was a child or a pet, kissed her with too much energy for that time of day.

“Then get the pancakes, kitten,” He looked at Jane after he said it, like they were sharing something, an understanding that his girlfriend was a lovable mess, and he was the kind of guy who put up with lovable messes.

Jane wrote it down without looking up. It was always like that, some tight little loop that never went anywhere.

From what Jane could gather, the couple never really talked about anything of substance. Mostly, they just made out and curled into each other, scrolling through their phones in silence. The guy played chess on his screen and the girl refreshed her own Instagram, zooming in on pictures of herself like she was examining them for flaws. They spoke in baby voices. Called each other kitten, baby, sweetie. Sometimes they talked about plans. Once, Jane heard them mention marriage.

“We should do something insane,” the girl said. “Like… I don’t know. Tanzania or something.”

“Kitten,” the guy said, playfully rolling his eyes. “We’re not getting married in Tanzania. My family would never allow it.”

Jane glanced at the girls hand; no ring. She wondered how long they’d been dating. The way they spoke made it seem like years. But the intensity, the manic affection, had that newly minted shine. Like they’d met the week before and decided they’d never be apart again.

Usually, that kind of couple would’ve irritated Jane. Made her roll her eyes and feel sick. But they tipped well, and she decided she liked them. One of the self help books she read once said something about choosing inspiration over envy. So she tried, really tried, to think they were sweet. Not revolting. Not irritating. Just… in love.

The way they looked at each other, that slack jawed hunger and passion, it made something tighten in Jane’s chest. She tried to imagine someone looking at her like that. Not with lust exactly, but with that same kind of stupid devotion. She couldn’t.

At some point, they started calling her by her name.

“Thanks, Jane,” the guy would smile, handing back the check like they were old pals. And because of the tips, always generous, sometimes absurd, she started making space for them even when there wasn’t any. Squeezing them in between tables, pretending not to notice the host’s raised eyebrows. She felt like she owed it to them, in some unspoken way. Besides, she liked when they came in. She liked watching them.

There wasn’t much to overhear, though, just the quiet hum of baby talk, the girl’s indecision over what to eat, the way he’d playfully sigh like it was the cutest most annoying thing in the world. Usually she ordered the salad and ate every bite. Then, like clockwork:

“I feel so sick." And he’d kiss her face, her neck, murmur to her in a voice reserved for toddlers or pets.

Jane remembered asking Ronnie once why he never called her anything sweet like baby, the names people used when they were in love or pretending to be. He looked at her like she’d said something humiliating. His dark, serious eyes flicking up with that familiar mix of annoyance and disdain.

“Because you’re not a baby,” he rasped. “You’re a twenty one year old woman.”

And yet, looking back, she’d been nothing but a baby. Soft. Innocent. Still waiting to be told what her purpose was.

One time, the boyfriend left in a rush, something about a forgotten meeting with the family lawyer. He kissed the girl hard on the face, right near her eye, then jogged out, barely finishing his coffee.

The girl stayed behind, legs folded up in the booth. She ordered the burger and fries. Then, after finishing the burger, asked for chicken fingers and a vanilla shake. Afterward, she disappeared into the bathroom and didn’t come back for fifteen minutes. When she did, she was on the phone, her voice pitched high.

“Can I come over now?” she said. “Are you done yet?”

A pause. Then she stood up too fast, nearly tipping her glass, and left a crumpled hundred on the table.

Jane didn’t see them for five days. She assumed they were on vacation somewhere because she once overheard the guy talking about taking her to his family’s house on some island. A private golf club, ultra exclusive, where his neighbors were Tiger Woods and Will Smith.

“Your mom hates me,” the girl had said, her voice childlike.

“She doesn’t hate you,” he replied. “She’s just uptight. And she’s seen all those photos of you in bikinis on Instagram.”

“What does she expect me to be? A nun?”

“Probably,” he laughed, leaning in to kiss her.

“But you make me happy. So she’ll just have to get over it.”

Jane had stood there holding the empty water pitcher, pretending not to listen. She wondered what it felt like to be defended. To be chosen over someone’s own mom. But also, the girl didn’t seem necessarily real to her. She was like a caricature of a girlfriend, sliding between hopelessness and vanity. Jane couldn’t tell if the guy truly loved her or just liked how she looked folded into his life, another beautiful thing to dress and feed and reassure. It was hard to imagine them on an island.

It was raining the morning she finally saw them again. Cold, heavy rain that made the windows fog and turned the street to a blur of gray. They came in early, too early. Eight a.m.

“You’re back!” Jane said automatically, trying on a smile. But the second she looked at them, something in her shifted. They looked wrecked. The girl’s face was swollen and raw, the kind of puffiness that only comes from crying so hard it changes your facial structure. The guy looked jittery, wired in a way that didn’t match the hour, but his eyes were dull with exhaustion.

Jane led them to their usual booth, though they didn’t sit their usual way. They sat across from each other now.

“Can I have the spaghetti and meatballs?” the girl asked, her voice weirdly bright. “Or is that like, totally insane for breakfast?”

“Not totally insane” Jane said, still smiling. “You should definitely get the spaghetti and meatballs.” Jane felt a flicker of something like pity, maternal almost. The girl looked unraveled, undone. Whatever had happened, it was bad. Jane knew.

The couple barely spoke. The guy scrolled through his phone with frantic thumbs. The girl just sipped her coffee and picked at the meatballs, moving them around her plate like they might say something if she stared hard enough.

Jane hovered nearby their table, pretending to wipe a counter, hoping to catch onto what was going on. At one point she approached with the coffee pot and asked the guy if he wanted a refill. He didn’t look up. But the girl did.

The look she gave him was radioactive, pure hatred, hot and buzzing. It hit Jane so hard she had to pretend she forgot something in the kitchen.

At one point, the guy disappeared to the bathroom. Jane walked over, balancing the tray against her hip.

“Do you want me to clear the plates? Or are you still working on the meatballs?”

The girl didn’t answer straight away. She was staring down at the table, her hands wrapped tightly around her coffee cup. Her eyes were red, puffy, the rims raw like she’d been rubbing at them for days.

“You can take them,” she said, wiping her face with the sleeve of her hoodie. Then, after a moment, she looked up at Jane.

“We probably won’t be coming back here anytime soon.”

There was something soft and defeated in her voice that made Jane’s heart hurt. The girl gave a small, lopsided smile, like she was apologizing for making a scene she hadn’t made.

“God,” she said, burying her face into her hands. “Why are men so fucking cruel?”

Jane wanted to ask what happened. She wanted to sit across from her and say, tell me everything. But she didn’t. She just stood there, running the possibilities through her head. Maybe he cheated. Maybe he had a second phone. Another girlfriend. Maybe he dumped her the night before, out of nowhere, like it was a meeting he forgot to cancel. Maybe he just made her feel stupid, in that small, deliberate way men do when they’ve already decided to leave someone.

“Why are they such assholes,” the girl muttered, not really asking.

Because they are, Jane wanted to say. Because they’ll take everything you give them until it stops being convenient or fun and then they’ll disappear. Because no matter how patient or soft you are, how much you twist yourself to be easy, they’ll always want someone else in the end. Someone shinier. Quieter. Someone their mother likes. And you’ll see it on Instagram, the engagement photo in Times Square or some island you weren’t invited to, and you will keep watching. You’ll watch as they get married and have children. And they’ll call that person their forever. Their baby. Their kitten. Their sweetie. And they’ll pretend like you never happened. And it will ruin you in very quiet and specific ways.

But Jane didn’t say any of that. She stacked the plates quietly and walked away.

They liked Myles, or at least pretended like they did. Especially Jack. Jack was the house they were at: a sprawling townhouse on Sixty Fifth and Park, the kind of place with silk curtains and a grand piano nobody played. His parents were already out in the Hamptons for the summer. Every weekend, Jack threw a party and every weekend, around midnight, he sent Myles the same text, always when the drinks were running low, when the crowd was starting to thin.

come thru bro

having people at mine rn

bring the stuff

Charlotte was the girl Jack had taken to prom, the one always moving around the house like she already belonged to it: smoothing pillows, fixing the music, arranging empty beer cans into neat little piles. She was pretty in the way a lot of girls were pretty. Blonde, soft, forgettable. Myles knew Jack would forget her, too. Probably before he even finished unpacking at Dartmouth.

“You don’t look like someone who smokes,” Myles said, handing her an American Spirit from his pack.

“I’m not,” she said, fumbling with the lighter. She stared out over the street, the way people did when they wanted to look like they were thinking about something.

“Where are you going to college?”

“I’m taking a gap year,” Myles said. He didn’t bother explaining that there was no college. That he’d keep doing what he was doing: dealing, buying sneakers he couldn’t afford, living with his brother and his brother’s girlfriend until one of them gave up first. Maybe the cops would get there before that. It didn’t matter.

“I’m going to Middlebury,” Charlotte said brightly. “Which is ideal, because it’s not that far from Jack.”

Myles just nodded. He didn’t care. He didn’t bother telling her what she’d figure out soon enough, that Jack wouldn’t be making trips to see her. That Jack would forget her name in a month, maybe less.

Jack loved dangling promises that would never happen. He’d made them to Myles all summer: parties that never happened, invitations that evaporated the minute he got what he wanted. A weekend in the Hamptons, his father’s box seats at the game. Golf and lunch at his country club. None of it ever materialized.

“I hope it works out,” Charlotte said. “I mean, I think it will.” She took a puff, the smoke drifting sideways in the air. “We’re dating now. Like, officially. Boyfriend and girlfriend. And we’ve had such an amazing summer. I know he can be a lot sometimes, but he’s actually really sweet.”

She paused, gave a small, embarrassed laugh.

“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m, like, venting to you.”

“I’m sure everything will work out,” Myles said, not bothering to look at her. Inside, he could hear Jack’s voice rise above the music. That high, reckless laugh, already moving on to the next thing.

Myles had heard how Jack talked about Charlotte when she wasn’t around. How he made it sound like a joke: a way to kill time before fall. His friends, boys with the same pink shorts, the same haircuts and gleaming watches, laughed along like they understood exactly what he meant.

Just the other afternoon, when Myles had dropped off weed and Percocet, Jack had pulled out his phone, scrolling to a photo Charlotte had sent him. Red lace underwear, nothing else, posing in front of her pink bedroom mirror.

“I mean, she’s obviously hot,” Jack said, turning his phone toward Myles. “Her rack is legit.”

He laughed, handed it over. “Be honest,” he said. “Would you keep her around?”

Myles looked, then shrugged. “I don’t know. College’s full of girls. Doesn’t really make sense to tie yourself down.”

Jack nodded, satisfied, already looking past him.

Myles wasn’t sure why he said it. Maybe because Jack expected him to. Maybe because it was easier than the truth.

He didn’t want them to end up together. He didn’t want Charlotte in that house all the time, curled up on the couch like she belonged there.

He hadn’t kissed anyone in months. Not since that girl, years ago now, who’d made him feel like he mattered, only to gut him in the end. Since then, love felt like a trick. Something other people fell for.

“Has he said anything about me?” Charlotte asked, snapping Myles out of his reverie. She coughed and ashed her cigarette on the railing, not looking at him.

Myles shrugged. She was the kind of girl he used to imagine dating—shiny blonde hair, glossed lips, always smelling faintly like something expensive.

“We don’t really talk about that stuff,” he said.

It wasn’t a lie, not exactly. But he wasn’t going to tell her the truth either—that Jack didn’t care. That he talked about Charlotte like she was an Airbnb rental. A girl to pass the time with until school started. Myles had heard the way he said her name, always flat like an afterthought. It was probably the same way Jack talked about him, if he talked about him at all.

Still, Myles saw it in her face, the flicker of hope, the tight smile, the way she inhaled like maybe she could steady herself with air. That kind of hunger. To be seen. To be wanted. And who wouldn’t want to be wanted by Jack? He had that thing, that pull, like when he looked at you, really looked at you, it felt like sunlight. Brief. Blinding. Warm enough to make you forget it wasn’t going to last.

“Yo,” Jack called out. Myles heard it through the glass: aggressive and impatient.

Charlotte tilted her head. “Think he’s calling for you.”

Myles didn’t move. Just kept looking out at the street, pretending not to hear him. A moment later, the door creaked open. Jack stepped out, eyes squinting against the city light. He saw them sitting there and hesitated, just for a second, but it was enough. Myles saw it: the flicker of something territorial in his expression.

“Dude,” Jack said. “I’ve been calling you.”

Myles turned, slow. “Sorry dude, what’s up?”

“We’re out,” Jack said. “Of Ket. Can you hit your guy?”

“Everyone’s dry tonight,” Myles said. “I already checked.”

Jack stared at him. “You’re always out,” he shouted. “Jesus!” Myles felt Charlotte shift beside him. Then he shrugged. “Not much I can do.”

Jack didn’t answer right away. He looked past them, into the dark street, then back at Myles like he wanted to say something else but couldn’t decide if it was worth it.

“Just try,” Jack muttered. “People are asking.”

“No one’s awake right now man,” Myles said, keeping his voice steady. “There’s nothing I can do. I gave you all the stuff I had.”

Jack stared at Myles with disgust, like the shortage of ketamine had been engineered just to spite him. From inside, laughter floated out. Someone said something Myles couldn’t hear, and the laughter got louder. Were they talking about him? About Charlotte? It was that hour before dawn when everything felt more dramatic, more sensitive, like your skin was thinner and every word could cut. Jack took a step closer.

“Then why don’t you get the fuck out of my house?”

He let it hang, then added, with emphasis. “And the fuck off my girlfriend.”

Charlotte flinched. She blinked fast, like she wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.

Myles froze. For a second, he thought he’d misheard too. That the words were meant for someone else.He’d seen Jack pissed before, but never like this. Never at him. Myles stood there, stunned, like the wind had been knocked out of him. The door creaked again. Jack was already back inside.

The sky was turning pink. The night had ended. And suddenly, Myles had no idea where to go.

“I’m so sorry,” Charlotte said. Her voice was quiet, like she was afraid of making it worse. “I’ll go inside and talk to him.”

Myles didn’t respond. He just looked at her, unable to move. His body felt heavy, like he’d been nailed to the chair. The beer in his hand was warm now, but he took a sip anyway. something to do. Something to hold.

He stayed there another second or two, then finally stood. His legs felt distant and shaky. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

He didn’t look for Jack. He didn’t look for Charlotte. He didn’t even glance at the couch where the guys were slouched, whispering, smirking.

“I’m done,” he said, not looking at anyone in particular. That’s when the laughter started. From the couch, cruel effortless laughter, like it had been waiting for a cue.

Jack didn’t say anything, but Myles saw his face, how he leaned back on the couch, drink in hand, like a king surveying his court. Triumphant.

That, more than the yelling, more than the insults, was what made Myles want to punch something. Not the insult, but the smugness. The ease. One of Jack’s friends muttered, “Someone’s in their feelings.”

More laughter came. Louder now. One of them clapped. A slow, sarcastic clap.

Jack raised his glass. “To my guy,” he said, bloodshot eyes still on Myles. “Always delivering. Except when it counts, of course.”

Myles didn’t think. He didn’t plan. He reached for the first thing he saw: a blue glass vase on the side table, and hurled it across the room.

The vase hit Jack square across the cheekbone. A sound like glass and bone shattering at once. His drink spilled across his chest. He slumped forward, hand to his face, and when he pulled it back, it was red. Blood running down his face. His fingers.

“Oh my god,” someone said. “Holy shit” another voice called out.

Myles stood there, chest heaving, still holding the base of the vase like he wasn’t finished.

“What the fuck happened?” Charlotte said, running over to him.

Jack looked up.“Are you insane?” he choked out. “We were messing around.” His voice cracked, like he was about to cry. He stared down at the blood on his hands. “What the fuck, man. What the hell?”

Myles didn’t answer. His body was still buzzing, like it hadn’t caught up yet with what he’d done. Like maybe it wasn’t real, wasn’t happening.

They all just stared at Myles, like he’d finally made himself visible. Myles didn’t wait for anyone to say anything else. He walked to the front doo slowly, like he had all the time in the world. The floor sticky beneath his shoes, the bass still thudding from the speaker in the corner. No one followed. He stepped out into the early morning, the sky pale and bleeding. For the first time all summer, Jack wasn’t the one in control. Myles didn’t feel proud. Didn’t feel triumphant. He didn’t feel anything. Just slightly energized. Energized and a little scared of what might happen next.

he abandons me at the shore

cold and swallowed by

my own grueling sadness

my toes curl into the sand

as an agony fills my lungs

like smoke. he was the last

poem I wrote. the last song

that I played and the last

piece of candy I ate.

implacably sweet I weep

because I miss him

already. because the month

sped before us with

so much stealth

and now I am alone again.

I feel my heart swell. this tormented

feeling in my chest I cannot

rest. how long will it last?

I’m afraid I’m too delicate

everything about me is soft

and warm. the sun falls aloft

the breaking waves.

a dash of pink

drips in this painfully

beautiful way.

I wonder how long it will take

for him to adore me again.

The voice wasn’t that of a frenemy (those girls who hype up your outfit while silently deciding it makes you look fat, who fail to mention when you have lipstick on your teeth—or worse, do mention it too late, after you’ve just said hi to your crush). No, this particular critique didn’t come from a friend but… wait for it… my own boyfriend.

When we talk about signs of male jealousy, we usually focus on the classics—monitoring your outfits, your location, your texts, crashing out when a guy hits on you at a bar.

What’s more insidious, harder to diagnose, is the jealousy that isn’t about controlling where you go but who you are. It’s jealousy of your very being and all the things you think they should love about you: your humor, your confidence, your achievements, even your gift for friendship. It’s the anxiety of comparative self-worth, of looking at the person you love and thinking: She is better than me, and that isn’t gonna fly.

I once dated a TikToker—embarrassing, I know, but let’s move past it. He had quit a perfectly stable finance job to review restaurants in the city, a decision that seemed brave and visionary in 2020 when making it big on TikTok was still like buying Bitcoin in 2012. At first, he was supportive of my own content creation journey. I had 500 followers, was pulling in girl-next-door numbers of maybe 5,000 views per post.

“You’re hilarious,” he’d say. “You’ll get there one day.”

And then, somewhat inconveniently for him, I did.

My videos started hitting the millions. His, meanwhile, plateaued at five figures. He was in denial about his slow motion fall-off, even emailing TikTok’s customer support claiming he was “shadowbanned.”

“I don’t think this will last,” he mused when I hit 100K followers in under a month. “It’s always like this in the beginning. Then they forget about you.”

The implication being: You're peaking. Enjoy it while you can. Start job hunting now. In other words: If I’m flopping, you have to be too.

We assume the men we love are proud of us, that our successes reflect well on them, that they see us as a flex. But the problem is some men have a zero-sum mindset: your success isn’t shared—it’s stolen.

One of my first boyfriends was, in retrospect, also one of my biggest haters. Not in an obvious way—he didn’t tell me to change or snoop through my phone. He didn’t want to possess me. He wanted to outshine me or, more precisely, not let me outshine him.

I started noticing things. When I asked him to take my picture, he’d take three blurry ones and tell me he was done for the day. At parties, even ones with his friends, he’d fold in on himself, annoyed I was having a good time. I was too loud, too talkative, too much.

He was great in a crisis—rushing in, gleam in his eyes, if I fell out with a friend or didn’t land a job I wanted. With good news, however, his reaction was suspiciously muted. No congratulations, no compliments, because, as he said once: “you already know you're beautiful.” He also liked to tell me, repeatedly, how I thought I was better than he was, even though I never once said that. (Not out loud, at least.)

I didn’t catch on until I decided after college to take an acting class—something I’d loved as a kid but lost touch with in high school. By the way he reacted, you’d think I’d announced plans to catch the next SpaceX flight.

“Really?” he scoffed. “I think you should just stick to modeling. Acting isn’t gonna happen for you.”

He then pulled up a video of himself from senior year, in which he played a murderer in a friend’s short film. A clear attempt to establish himself as the real actor in the relationship. To be fair, he did have a serial killer vibe. He really should’ve leaned into playing villains instead of settling for a career in insurance.

He also hated my best friend, Jade. The kind of fun, independent, effortlessly glamorous girl that a man who prefers his girlfriend in a state of quiet deference will always despise. Girls’ nights with Jade always resulted in a fight.

“How come when you’re with Jade, you stay out all night?”

Because Jade is fun, and you, my dear, are about as exciting as a tax seminar. Instead of saying that though, I just smiled and saw her less. Because Jade was a trigger for him.

At the time, I assumed this was just youthful insecurity. Surely, my next boyfriend wouldn’t see me as his opponent.

But then it happened again.

And again.

There was the preppy lawyer who didn’t mind my looks but found it unacceptable that I also liked to read and write poetry. (He was the self-styled intellectual of the relationship, big on his one deep read of Infinite Jest.) There was the guy who nodded politely when I got a feature in a major magazine but nearly wept with joy when he was reposted by a meme account with 10K followers.

And that’s when I realized: some men don’t date women. They date their own egos.

When their fragile sense of superiority is threatened, the knives come out. They’re hardwired to believe they need to dominate in all spheres: career, social life, dinner check coverage. (Okay, the latter is fine.) And when that hierarchy gets disrupted, say, you get a promotion, or a stranger compliments you in front of them, they spiral. If she’s thriving, what does that make me? A supportive boyfriend? A loving partner? No, a beta cuck.And that simply won’t do.

So, they cope the only way they know how: by minimizing your success: “It’s not that impressive.” By guilt-tripping you: “You’re always working now.” By one-upping you:“I actually passed on that project, but you should do it.” If they’re truly desperate, they’ll try to rewrite history: “I let you win.”

Dude, the only thing you guided me toward was the realization that having a boyfriend can feel like competing in an unpaid talent show.

At the root of all this is fear. If you become too successful, too impressive, too out of their league, you’ll leave. The irony is, passive-aggressive put downs are the fastest way to make that happen. Because no woman wants to date a man who sees her as an opponent. We want someone who cheers us on, not secretly hopes we trip on our way to the stage.

Because if we’re going to fall, we’d rather land in the arms of someone who actually likes us.

Now let’s rewind, shall we?

Senior year of college , if my boyfriend didn’t sleep in my bed every night, I’d threaten to end it all. If he told me I was crazy, I’d act crazier, staying up all night texting like a deranged codependent lunatic. I couldn’t stomach sleeping alone, the emptiness of my antique pink chair without his thrift store clothes draped over it, the cold wood floor free of his mismatched socks.

My very first boyfriend freshman year conditioned me for this. He had bunk beds, but his roommate was always at his girlfriend’s, so we crammed into the bottom bunk nightly, smoking weed and having deep, one sided chats; me oversharing, him looking confused and vaguely horrified.

One night, I got too drunk at his frat’s themed “Wimbledon” party. He had just taken Molly and didn’t want to play nurse, so my best friend took me home. At 7 a.m., I woke up alone in my tennis skirt, still drunk and scared. I trekked across campus in the snow. A baseball player let me into his dorm. I knocked on his door until my hand hurt. No answer. So I climbed through the window and into his bed. He looked shaken but held me, and just like that, the world felt decent again.

He dumped me before finals, told me I was needy and codependent and needed to “work on myself.” My first heartbreak: checked off the list. I chain-smoked parliaments in my best friend’s car while we listened to The Lumineers, the April sun high in the sky, my sad wet eyes catching in the rearview mirror.

I thought I’d learned men don’t like needy women. But with my second boyfriend, we blurred into each other immediately. His roommates called me their third. He was from California and our summer apart felt like slow death, a physical ache in my chest. When we reunited, most fights started with me demanding more of him—more time, more attention, more proof I was his priority. If he had a test and wanted a good night’s sleep, I unraveled. You can probably guess how it ended.

I was single for years afterwards. And in that time, I accomplished more than I ever had. I learned to sleep through the night. I developed a workout routine, took myself on solo movie dates, wrote every day, finished a novel, signed with a top modeling agency, found internet fame, made money for the first time and burned through it just as quickly. None of that would have happened if he hadn’t dumped me. If I hadn’t learned to be alone.

But then I fell for a skater/DJ/streetwear guy who loved rotting in bed as much as I did. We spent six months in his sheets, waking up at 1 p.m on Tuesdays, getting lunch, cuddling until dark, convincing ourselves it was too late to be productive. I didn’t write. I didn’t work. I just floated.

I swore I’d never let another man disrupt my routine and pause my very promising career. Maybe the problem was that I kept picking men without real jobs, men who didn’t have to be anywhere at 9 a.m. I dumped him.

And shortly after I found someone new: a guy with his shit together. He went to the gym. He had an office, his own company, real responsibilities. He was handsome, disciplined, energetic. He’d inspire me to be better, to finally grow up.

Two months later, we were eating lukewarm lo mein in bed, trapped in a vicious cycle of bed rotting and movie marathons. My deadlines were decaying in my inbox, my gym membership was a distant memory and I was slipping into my favorite bad habit—turning love into a two person hibernation.

Because who wouldn’t want to bask in the glow of mutual dysfunction?

“I don’t know what happened to me,” he muttered at three a.m., staring at the ceiling like it had answers. “I was so good before we met. I was going to the gym. I was going to work. I wasn’t just…”

“Rotting in bed,” I finished for him.

That’s when the realization hit me: maybe the issue wasn’t the men I picked. Maybe the issue was….me. My relentless talent for sinking into inertia, for replacing real life responsibilities with the warm embrace of my sheets. Who needed to step outside when doordash brought the world to your door? Why build a life when you could decay in tandem with someone else?

At first, it was fun. But now my boyfriend looked… sad. Turns out, codependency isn’t nearly as sexy as the movies make it seem. I thought about that Rupi Kaur quote people post on their story when they get dumped: A person should never complete you, only compliment you. But he did complete me. And I completed him. And now neither of us were complete at all.

I don’t know how to be the kind of person who makes people better instead of luring them into the same lazy abyss I exist in. My talent isn’t in lifting people up; it’s in making them comfortable being down. I become their favorite bad influence, and we marinate in shared mediocrity, convincing ourselves that nothing working out for us is romantic. That we’re different. And maybe I’ll be the love of their life, but never the woman they marry, never the mother of their children—because no one wants to wife up the girl who sleeps till noon and thinks reading a Colleen Hoover novel or half-assing a 15-minute YouTube workout is the hallmark of productivity.

But the answer isn’t just being single. Or maybe it is, but I hate definitive answers. Maybe it’s Prozac. Maybe it’s sobriety. Maybe it’s enforcing a strict no sleepovers on school nights policy like a responsible parent, except I’m the bratty child who refuses to listen.

Maybe it’s just being busier, filling my days with enough structure that I don’t have time to unravel. Maybe my frontal lobe is still developing, or maybe it’s just defective. Maybe I’ll keep floating like this forever.

They say how you spend your days is how you spend your life. My therapist says I’m too young to be a loser.

I’m not sure which one scares me more. But I know one thing is for certain:

Im 27 now, and I still have a got a lot of maturing to do.

you fold yourself small

make yourself tragic

steal my suffering and

wear it like a costume.

I let love turn me stupid

let it buckle my knees

head bowed at the altar

of your hands

hands that always know

exactly where to press

and how to hold.

even now

after you’ve dirtied it

I slip back under

let the chlorine burn of your eyes

wash over me like it hasn’t

already made me

want to disappear.

I write because I have no better god

I should be standing

walking

running

hating you so much

it turns me red.

but I still want you

to press me to your chest

to cradle me like a child

to whisper pretty lies

to call me your girl

as if nothings changed

as if nothing will.

disposable. your words

like glass shards

glinting in the

wreckage of

what could have been

real.

after sex

your fingers spidered

for the girls in

your phone. their

affirmations

a cream swirl

in your morning coffee.

it didn’t matter

what they looked

like.didn’t matter

that your body

was still warm

in my bed

or that their

fishnets and filler

mirrored the things you

claimed

repulsed you.

stalker— you said about

me. a madwoman

for asking

while your hands

fumbled

for the lace clasp

of her bra

(i thought you fell asleep?)

you’re the reason

i have these

fucked up

issues. the fault lines

that split open

when innocence

approaches

me.

the reason i

destroy

what i should

protect

the awful way

i come

undone

so desperate

so pathetic

so paranoid.

you have a new girl now

la woman

silicone

thing. hand picked

from the dust of

your message

requests.

i’ll never forgive you

not for what you did

but for the way you

trained me

to flinch at kindness.

bright red letters

but a shadow lodged

at the base of my throat

a knot

that only ever tightens

weaving itself through

my breath

a sickness i’d rather die

from than let anyone

notice.

you’re a misery

you know

always folding in on

yourself. shoulders caving

eyes calcified

a fortress built to deflect

kindness

because kindness

is a trap and

everyone is always

out to get you.

i hate you because i understand

your misery

your tantrums and

conspiracies

the lies as smooth

as silk

a foreign language

only we speak

and we speak it well

don’t we?

i hate you for

the silent way you destroy

yourself. not with explosions

but with slow intentional

burns

you light a match and

watch the smoke

fill the room

then call the fire someone else’s

it’s never ours is it?

i hate the masks you wear

shifting to whatever shape

the room suggests

your shine is blinding

a brilliance they can’t resist

and they cheer

they always cheer

for the illusion you create.

i hate you for your ease

the way you carve the world

so effortlessly

you make it look

hard earned

but we both know it isn’t

we both know

how easily it has always

come.

and your tenderness

your revolting tenderness

the way you make people feel

so seen and whole

the center

of your universe

it’s a lie

though

it always is

you never mean it

we never do.

i hate you for all of it

for being like me

for being better than me

we are mirrors and i hate it

i hate myself in you.

She stared at him longer than she meant to. When he caught her looking, he smiled and walked over like he’d known her all his life.

“Should’ve taken a picture,” he said, his voice smooth. “Would’ve lasted longer.”

She hated him immediately.

“Thatcher,” he said, extending his hand, his voice rich with arrogance, like even his name was something impressive. “And you are?”

“Violet,” she said flatly, but his confidence didn’t waver for a second. He asked if she wanted a drink, and then came the shots, the dizzying small talk, and eventually, the dancing. They ended up making out on the dance floor, his hands firm around her waist, and it was good—like really good. There was that charge, that electricity she hadn’t felt in ages, a thrill she’d convinced herself she wasn’t capable of feeling anymore.

They did coke in the bathroom, his platinum Amex dividing the lines with a practiced ease. Between each bump, they kissed, their mouths tingling against each other, her lipstick smearing across his face. By the time the club lights came on and the bouncers began herding everyone out, Thatcher grabbed her hand like it meant something, like she was a person worth keeping close.

“Can I walk you home?” he asked when they got outside. The air was pale blue and humid, the kind of warmth that only existed in the last hours before sunrise. “If you live near here.”

She did. And he could.

They walked the six blocks to her building in Chinatown, her embarrassment growing with each step. She lived in a crumbling walk-up with chipped paint and narrow stairs that always smelt like cigarettes and something rotten. When they reached her door, he stared at the building for a moment, just long enough for her to register the judgment in his eyes.

“Can I come up?” he asked finally. “Just to sleep.”

She smiled. “Maybe another time. I had fun tonight, though.”

She leaned in for one last kiss, already half-turned toward her door, when he said, “Wait.”

Violet froze. Different scenarios spun through her mind; her makeup smudged and tragic in the early light, her dress rumpled, her hair sticking to the back of her neck. He probably regretted the whole thing. She braced herself for something cruel, a throwaway insult disguised as a joke. But instead, he said, “Want to go to the Hamptons tomorrow?”

“What?”

“My parents are away. A buddy of mine and his girlfriend will be there too. Planning on leaving around noon.” He smiled warmly. “I’d really like it if you came with.”

“I don’t even know you,” she said, unsure if he was kidding.

“Don’t worry,” Thatcher replied. “I’m not going to kidnap you.” Then he laughed. “Unless you’re into that sort of thing.”

The truth was, he wasn’t a stranger—not entirely. Thatcher felt like someone she’d already known in pieces, someone built from the bits of men she’d dated in the past: the charm, the confidence, the unshakable sense that the world was designed to bend toward him. If anyone was a stranger, it was her. She wasn’t from his world. She didn’t grow up wealthy or go to a fancy boarding school. Her thrift-store clothes and rough beauty, the kind of beauty that men often called “exotic,” felt lightyears away from his organized, lazy perfection.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Why not.”

They exchanged numbers, his fingers brushing hers as he handed her his phone.

“I’ll call you in the morning,” he said, and then kissed her again before disappearing into the morning light.

—————————-

The next morning, Violet woke up early, her stomach churning with excitement. For a moment she wasn’t sure if Thatcher was real, or if the whole night had been some weird fever dream. But then, at exactly ten o’clock, her phone lit up with his name.

Hiiiii

So hungover lol

You packed? :)

A pathetic smile stretched across her face. She’d never been to the Hamptons and had no idea what to pack. After an hour of scrolling Pinterest boards and watching influencer vlogs she decided on two sundresses, two bikinis, a pair of jeans, and a sweater, just in case. She showered, did her hair, carefully applied her makeup. Before she knew it, it was noon.

On the way :) he texted.

He pulled up fifteen minutes later in a sleek black Mercedes wearing aviators, his hair still slightly messy from the night before. She slid into the passenger seat, inhaling the new-car smell. The 1975 played low on the radio, and he mentioned offhand that they were his favorite band before switching to Kanye West. He drove fast but steady, one hand on the wheel, the other occasionally reaching over to rest on her knee. They talked about their lives as they crawled through the traffic, mostly his. He hated his finance job, his boss was a narcissist, the hours were insane. She laughed at his impressions, and he laughed too.

When they finally got to the Hamptons, he pointed out the different towns as they passed: Water mil, Southampton, Bridge, gesturing toward his favorite restaurants and mentioning how the traffic was always brutal on that particularly stretch of highway. He puffed on a Juul as he drove, thin clouds of smoke dissolving in the space between them. He was the only person she knew who still smoked a Juul. It struck her as funny and odd, but then again, everything about Thatcher felt a little unreal. A little too perfect, too curated, like she was stepping into someone else’s dream.

Finally, they pulled up to his house in East Hampton, the car crunching over the long gravel driveway as he punched a code into the gate. The wrought iron gates swung open slowly, revealing a sprawling white estate. The hedges were trimmed with surgical precision, the lawn so green it looked fake. Thatcher grabbed her duffle from the trunk, slinging it casually over his shoulder. “Come on,” he said, leading her up the stone steps to the front door.

Inside, the air was cool and faintly lemon-y, like it had been cleaned that morning just in time for their arrival. The house was vast but restrained. Heavy antique furniture, crisp white slipcovers, oil paintings hung in thick, gilded frames.

“Your parents live here?” Violet asked, trailing him through the house.

“They’re mostly in Jackson now,” he said, setting her bag down in a guest room. “Wyoming, My dads big into fishing. And my sister’s an equestrian.” The bed was draped in a white duvet, flanked by matching nightstands with blue hydrangeas in glass vases.

She changed into a bikini and met Thatcher out by the pool. The sun was already high, casting shadows across the lawn. He was in the water when she arrived, bobbing lazily.

“Come on in.” he said. “Water’s a little chilly, but you’ll get used to it.”

She dipped her toes in first, the cold water shocking against her feet, and then slid in. The two of them floated there for what felt like hours, the sun beating down on their faces, the world around them soft and sparkly.

Eventually, Thatcher’s friend and his girlfriend appeared in the backyard, walking through the French doors like they had done this a thousand times.

“Join us” Thatcher called, standing waist-deep in the pool, water dripping off his shoulders. “This is Violet,” he said, nodding toward her.

The friend let out a short, barky little laugh, a sound that felt mocking.

“What?” Thatcher said with a devilish grin.

The friend just shook his head, hands on his hips, staring down at the grass like he was trying not to say something that would get him in trouble. The friend was short, with beady little eyes and slicked-back hair. He wore salmon Bermuda shorts and a striped shirt emblazoned with a whale logo. His girlfriend was petite and blonde, with a pinched expression that suggested she hadn’t laughed in her entire life.

Thatcher brought out bottles of rosé, the glass sweating in the heat, and they all drank by the pool until the sun started to dip behind the trees, streaking the sky with pink and orange. A Filipino woman in pink sweats served pesto pasta and salad, and they ate it dripping by the pool. Later, they wandered down to the beach, the sand cool and soft under their feet. Thatcher stayed close to Violet, his hand resting on her waist. The alcohol had loosened the mood, and even the girlfriend seemed a little more relaxed.

“So, how do you know Thatcher?” His friend asked, glancing at Violet.

“Picked her up at the club last night,” Thatcher said, cracking open a beer from the cooler he’d brought.

“You dog,” his friend said. Everyone laughed. Everyone except Violet.

Back at the house, Thatcher said, “Let’s meet in an hour. I’ll drive us to dinner, maybe we hit Talkhouse after?” Everyone drifted to their rooms, Violet included, her head still buzzing from the wine. She’d barely closed the door behind her when her phone lit up with a text from him.

Come upstairssssss

His room was massive, with a vaulted ceiling and a king sized bed that looked like it belonged in a hotel suite. They showered together, steam curling around them as he turned on the water. He washed her hair with a lilac shampoo, then slid a bar of soap over her body, lingering between her legs. They kissed under the stream of pulsing hot water, their mouths slippery and wet, and she felt herself giving in completely.

She was still drunk, she could feel it in the fuzziness of her limbs, the way time felt slower than usual. They fell onto his bed, her skin damp, and the next thing she knew he was pushing inside her. Her hips rose to meet him, her head tilting back as he whispered, “Baby,” in her ear, his hands gripping her hair. His movements grew sharper, more urgent, and then he shuddered, collapsing on top of her.

When it was over, she got up quietly and put her cold, wet bikini back on..

“That was amazing,” Thatcher said. “You’re incredible.”

————————-

The restaurant was a dimly lit Italian spot nestled right in the nearby town. The kind of place where the women wore cashmere shawls draped loosely over their shoulders. Thatcher took charge immediately, ordering multiple appetizers, entrees for the table, two bottles of wine. Violet sat back, trying to do the math in her head, wondering how she could possibly afford even her share with the two hundred dollars sitting in her checking account.

Thatcher commanded the table with ease. He told stories and jokes his friend laughed a little too hard at. The three of them gossiped about people Violet didn’t know—old roommates, exes, former friends who had disappeared after doing something cringe.

When the bill came, Thatcher tossed his card down without a second thought. No one even looked at it. No one said thank you. It was just expected, the natural order of things.

After dinner, they piled into his car, Thatcher driving fast with the windows down. He took them to a bar in the next town over, a weathered old place with most of the crowd spilling outside. The line stretched down the block, a pulsing heap of bodies that looked like it hadn’t moved in hours.

“Fuck this,” Thatcher said, pulling out his wallet. He flattened four crisp hundred-dollar bills between his fingers and walked straight to the front of the line. He garbled something to the bouncer, and just like that, they were in.

The bar was chaotic, the air thick with smoke and beer and sweat. Everyone looked like they’d just come off a bus from boarding school—messy hair, rumpled linen shirts, a kind of perfectly calculated disarray. Thatcher grabbed Violet’s hand, weaving them through the crowd. He dropped it every so often to say hi to people he knew, which seemed to be almost everyone. She stood by his side, waiting for him to introduce her, but he didn’t.

The night blurred. Violet drank too much, her vision doubling as she tried to keep track of Thatcher in the packed crowd. At one point, she found herself alone at the bar, scanning faces for his familiar curls. A lanky guy, who looked barely eighteen, offered to buy her a drink. She let him, but when he leaned in to kiss her, she ran off.

She spotted Thatcher smoking in the outside area, his arm draped lazily over some guy she didn’t recognize. When he saw her he pulled her close like nothing had happened. They danced for hours, his hands on her waist, their mouths crashing together in sloppy kisses.

By the time they left, everyone was too drunk to be behind the wheel, but Thatcher drove anyway. Drake blared from the speakers, the bass rattling the car as they sped down the highway. Violet leaned her head back against the seat, half asleep, her body still buzzing from the alcohol. She couldn’t tell if it was thrilling or deeply unsettling. Maybe it was both.

When they got back to the house, Thatcher led her to his room, his hand gripping hers as if it were all inevitable. They collapsed onto the bed and he tore off her dress with an urgency that felt particularly aggressive. His hands moved roughly over her body, smacking her ass, his kisses landing hard and fast. He was drunk; she could tell by the way his movements were a little too fast, too careless.

“Can we just chill for a second?” she said, her voice small but firm. ”I’m really drunk.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?” he said, before grabbing the back of her neck. She tried to pull away, to slow things down a bit, filling the air with fragmented excuses, but he wasn’t listening.

“Don’t be a tease,” he snapped. “We already did it earlier. What difference does it make?”

When she tried to get up, he grabbed her arm, shoving her back onto the bed. Her head hit the headboard with a sharp crack.

“Ow,” she said, louder than she’d intended to. She rubbed her head. “That hurt.”

“You’ll be okay,” he said, climbing on top of her, his weight pressing down. Before she knew what was happening he wriggled off her underwear and shoved inside of her. He kept losing his erection, his frustration mounting with each failed attempt. She closed her eyes, wanting badly to disappear. It was easier to let it happen though, easier to stay quiet and and wait for the moment to end. Eventually he gave up, rolling over and muttering something she didn’t catch. She lay there, wide awake, as his breathing slowed into sleep. He had his back to her, the freckled expanse of his shoulders shimmering in the moonlight. She leaned over to kiss his spine, but he grunted and inched away. She tried to hold him anyway, wrapping an arm around his waist, but he shook her off like the movement was something he couldn’t stomach.

She stayed like that for a while, staring at the shape of his body in the dark, feeling the distance between them stretch even further. At some point, exhaustion pulled her under, but her sleep was restless, full of half-formed dreams.

——————————-

In the morning, Violet woke up alone. She remembered only fragments of the night before—flashes of them kissing at the bar, the drunk car ride home, the way she’d told him no and how he hadn’t listened. The lanky boy that bought her a drink and tried to kiss her.

She forced herself up, her body heavy, and looked out the window. Everyone was already by the pool, drinks in hand, their laughter faintly audible through the glass. She checked her phone. It was noon. She retreated to the guest bedroom, threw on a bikini, and went outside to join them.

When she got there, no one acknowledged her except the girlfriend.

“Morning!” the girl said, overly chipper, and Violet immediately recognized the pity in her voice and hated it. Thatcher flashed her a quick grin before ducking his head under the water. His friend laughed, like it was the funniest thing in the world.

Violet sat on the edge of the chaise, the sun beating down on her neck. The tension was unbearable. She glanced at Thatcher, his body gleaming as he swam, and hated him in that moment—hated how unwelcome he made her feel, like she had stumbled into a party no one invited her to.

Suddenly, she couldn’t stand it for another second.

“Is there a bus or something I can take back?” She pretended to glance at her phone. “I just realized I have to work tonight.”

“There are jitneys,” the girlfriend said, cutting in before Thatcher could respond. She climbed out of the pool, water dripping onto the deck, and grabbed a towel.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll help you figure it out.”

Inside, the girl’s bikini left wet marks on the wood as she padded to the counter and reached for her phone. There was a long pause that felt like minutes.

“There’s one at 1:15” she said finally. The girl gave her a small, pitiful smile. “And I’m sorry Thatcher’s being weird. He can be such a dick sometimes. It’s not you. Don’t worry.”

“Whatever,” Violet said flatly. “I’m going to go pack.”

She gathered her things quickly, stuffing them into her bag without care. When she came back outside, the scene felt even more distant—Thatcher floating lazily in the pool, his friend smirking, the girlfriend pretending not to notice the tension.

“I’m gonna head back to the city I think” Violet announced, her voice louder than she intended. “There’s a jitney soon, and I have to work tonight. So yeah. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you guys.”

Thatcher’s friend shot him a look, eyebrows raised, and Thatcher made a face back, a “what do you want me to do?” shrug, before sighing and climbing out of the pool.

He dried himself off with deliberate slowness, letting the towel drag over his tan shoulders, drops of water still clinging to his skin. Then he grabbed his phone, the glowing screen catching the edges of his face as he led Violet inside.

“I’ll call you an Uber to the stop,” he said, barely glancing up as he tapped. “It’s not too far.”

“Thanks,” Violet said, searching for his eyes, wishing she could read him better.

“Course,” he replied, tone flat.

She lingered, standing in the doorway, waiting for something else—a comment, a joke, some sign that this wasn’t as hollow and transactional as it felt. But he just stood there, scrolling absently. And then, finally, without looking at her:

“The guys outside,” he said, flashing her another tight lipped smile.

“I had fun yesterday,” she said, her voice a little too desperate. “Thanks for inviting me. Your friends are cool too.”

“Yeah it was fun” he said with a nod, his attention already somewhere else. “I’ll see you back in the city.”

She felt the lie in his words as soon as he said them. He wasn’t going to see her back in Manhattan. She knew that. She could tell by the finality in his tone, the way he didn’t drive her to the jitney, or even offer to walk her out the door. For a moment, she almost said something, something to cut through the tension. Almost asked why he was suddenly being so weird. But she just nodded, gave him a weak smile, and turned away. As she walked out of the house, her bag slung over one shoulder, she could hear the faint sound of laughter drifting in from the pool. She didn’t look back. She didn’t want to see him already moving on, already forgetting.

The Uber pulled up just as she reached the gate.

“For Thatcher?” the driver said. Violet nodded and slid in, shutting the door with more force than she intended, and sat back in the seat as the car rolled away. The house disappeared in the rearview mirror, and with it, the brief fantasy she’d let herself believe in. By the time they hit the highway, it all felt distant, like something that had happened to someone else. She knew she would never see him again.

Opal was his world. Upstairs, it was a bright, mirrored restaurant; downstairs, his true domain: low red couches, freezing cold air, and a DJ booth glowing like a shrine. Plum always felt chosen there—skipping the line, drinking for free, the center of Axel’s attention. She liked the way people looked at her as she danced behind the DJ booth: their curiosity, their envy.

But none of that involved her new boyfriend, Noah.

Plum met him in a poetry class her parents made her take to add “structure” to her summer. Two hours in a rec center basement with dusty light pouring through high windows. He had a delicate, almost breakable quality—pretty in a way that made you uneasy, like it wouldn’t last. He braided her hair and wrote her poems on loose sheets of notebook paper.

He was her summer boyfriend, a distraction before she started at Brown in the fall. Noah didn’t know her stepdad’s name—and the money behind it—was the only reason she’d gotten in.

With Noah, she got to play at being someone else: the version of herself she imagined late at night, someone unburdened, unmarked. They’d sit cross-legged on his thrift-store rug, picking at greasy takeout cartons, passing a joint back and forth. The jokes were dumb, barely strung together, but they felt brilliant at midnight, illuminated by the haze of smoke and the streetlight spilling through his blinds. He made her feel small in a way that wasn’t belittling, but safe—like she was something manageable, something he could hold carefully in his narrow hands.

Whenever she went to Opal, she framed it as a girls’ night. “Think we’re heading to Opal,” she’d say, already slipping on her Jimmy Choos. Noah would nod, smiling softly. “Okay, babe.” But his smile would always falter, his disappointment palpable as he lingered by the door when she left.

Plum told herself Noah was temporary, disposable. A barista from Minnesota, living in a cramped Chinatown walk-up with his sister, only in New York for the summer. Perfect.

“He seems like your boyfriend,” her friends teased, peering over her shoulder as she sent him heart emojis and I love yous. Plum had told him she loved him early on, and he’d said it back, so happy it made her wince. Did she love him? She didn’t know. She hadn’t said it to anyone before.

She liked dating Noah because he stayed. Unlike the boys before him—wealthy, dangerous, fleeting—Noah felt safe. Until her phone buzzed with party invites, Hamptons weekends, and last-minute trips to St. Tropez. Until Axel texted, promising her the best table by the DJ booth, and just like that, Noah disappeared from her mind.

Plum told Noah to meet her at her birthday dinner at nine, even though it started at eight. She lied, saying the girls were pregaming at her friend Serena’s when they were actually at Plum’s townhouse. She dressed for perfection—a silver dress, freshly done makeup, her new lips still swollen from the recent injections she’d gotten.

The night blurred: shots of Grey Goose, dirty martinis, the red-lit hallway of Opal, the laughter of her friends as they settled into their table. Axel appeared with a tray of drinks, rubbing Plum’s shoulders as he kissed her cheek.

“Only the best for our birthday girl,” he said before disappearing again.

Plum checked her phone: four texts and a missed call from Noah.

Outside I think

Guy’s being a dick

Won’t let me in

Can u come get me?

Plum exhaled sharply, dread blooming in her chest. “I have to go get Noah,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“The barista?” Serena smirked. “I can’t believe he actually showed up.”

Plum forced a laugh, but her stomach twisted as she stepped outside. Noah stood by the rope, awkward and out of place.

“Plum!” he said, his face lighting up when he saw her.

“He’s with me,” Plum told the bouncer, her voice clipped.

Axel stumbled out of the double doors, his hand draping over her shoulder as his eyes locked on Noah.

“Who’s this kid?” Axel asked.

“That’s my—” Plum hesitated.

“Her boyfriend,” Noah said, stepping forward, extending his hand. “Nice to meet you, man.”

“Boyfriend?” Axel repeated, his voice sharp with mockery. “You have a boyfriend?”

Plum felt the heat rise to her face.

“Not happening tonight,” Axel said. “Sorry.”

“I’ll just go,” Noah said quietly, his shoulders slumping.

Plum led him down the block. “I can go back with you,” she offered, though it was only a formality. She didn’t want to go back with him.

“This place is shit anyway,” Noah said. “Go. Have fun.”

“Okay,” Plum said softly. “Can I at least have a kiss?”

He leaned in, but the kiss felt stiff, like an obligation. She hugged him quickly before turning back to the club, guilt prickling her skin. She shoved it down. It was her birthday.

The next morning, Plum woke with a pounding head, her memories fragmented: shots at the bar, coke in the bathroom, music thundering in her ears. She couldn’t remember how she’d even gotten home.

She called Noah. No answer. She called again. Five times. Six.

Come over.

Pls.

Need u.

It’s my bday wtf

Can u come over??

Hello?

Are u mad?

Her phone lit up.

Ok, I’ll b there in an hour. Happy bday.

When he arrived, he stepped into her lavender bedroom like he was a stranger. He sat on the edge of her bed, silent.

“Aren’t you going to say happy birthday?” she asked.

“Happy birthday,” he said, his voice cracking.

“I know you’re mad about last night,” Plum said, her lips a straight line.

“I’m not mad,” he said, staring at the floor. She could see his eyes water a little.

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I just think…” He paused.

“You think what?” Her voice broke.

“I don’t think this is working,” he said finally. It hit her like a punch to the gut.

“Fine,” she snapped, waiting for him to take it back. But he didn’t.

“I just don’t think we’re compatible,” he continued, his voice steady. “This world isn’t me, and you… you just want to go out and party. I don’t want to stop you.”

“I don’t,” she said desperately, but his expression didn’t change.

She grabbed his hands, clutching them tightly. “Please,” she begged. “Don’t do this. I love you. I’ll stop going out. I’ll introduce you to my family and be a better girlfriend. I promise. Just please don’t leave me. Don’t do this.”

“I’m sorry,” Noah said, his voice soft but final.

She collapsed into his arms, begging him, promising to change. He stayed until her sobs quieted, but he was already gone, shrinking before her eyes.

When he stood to leave, she grabbed the stuffed animal he’d won her at Coney Island and hurled it at his back. It hit him squarely, but he didn’t turn around.

When the door shut behind him, Plum felt like her world had collapsed. She buried her face in her pillow, her chest heaving with erratic, shallow breaths.

She thought about all the times Noah had loved her, the way he’d made her feel safe, seen. She thought about the soup he made when she had the flu, the way he held her and kissed her forehead like she was the only person who mattered.

And now, he was just gone.

The smell of him lingered faintly in the room after he left.. She pressed her face deeper into the pillow, sobbing, panic clawing at her chest. She had lost him, and for the first time, she understood the kind of pain that never really goes away.

the white river staggers 

its frozen teeth gnawing

at the shoreline. 

across from me 

you sit—-a breathing

blinking miracle. 

this quiet and 

complete 

thing. 

music dilutes the edges

softens the worlds screech

Into a hum. 

but panic claws—

its fingers slick

nails blackened

with the blood of futures

I’ve already imagined.

I have never learned the

art of enjoyment. 

I keep endings close 

hoard them like

relics. stack them on

altars no one prays

to. 

I mourn this—

this stillness

this moment of

bright white heat

because you are here

because you are mine

because one day

you might not be. 

Chloe was at dinner with her dad and his new girlfriend when she saw him—James. Or at least, the back of his head, the line of his profile. He was at the bar while she sat at a table in the middle of the room, her father already mid-monologue about the chaos of the flight, something about a delay and an upgrade. These dinners were an annual ritual. Her father would fly into town, book a Midtown hotel, and introduce the latest girlfriend—this one Polish and thirty-five, younger each time, as if aging in reverse.

She couldn’t stop staring at James, couldn’t stop rehearsing in her head when the right moment might be to go up and say hello. It had been two years since she last saw him, since she’d shuffled out of his bedroom, leaving behind whatever passed for closure. After that, he was just gone. No social media, no mutual friends to trace him through. They had matched on Hinge, and when he ghosted her, it was almost effortless for him to disappear completely, to vanish as if he never existed.

“Chloe,” her father said. “Chloe.”

She blinked, snapping back to the present, her father’s tired eyes fixed on her with an edge of concern.

“Zofia asked you a question.”

As if she had been paying attention to Zofia, to anything other than the back of James’s head and the memories she couldn’t seem to shake loose, those stubborn moments of tenderness they had shared two years ago. He had been her first—her first everything. The first boy she slept with, the first one she loved, the only one who had ever really mattered. And now here he was, close enough to touch. She could feel the flicker of possibility, the fantasy sparking back to life. He was here, and this could be their chance to start over.

“I work at a lingerie store,” Chloe said flatly, barely looking at her.

“They sell pajamas, too,” her father added. “And it’s very high-end. All silks. Very expensive stuff.”

Chloe never imagined herself working retail after graduating from Boulder. She wanted to act again, like she had as a little girl. She could still picture her family’s proud expressions when they’d gather to watch her in hair-beading infomercials or the Gillette commercial that had somehow covered her college tuition. But when she grew into her features—became a woman—something shifted. Age seemed to sharpen her face into another dimension, a beautiful child turned unremarkable adult. There was always something off, her features too severe for the soft roundness of her cheeks. Dieting helped. Starving.

The lingerie store was fine work, decent pay, nothing that required too much thought. She liked sifting through delicate garments, stealing Hanky Panky underwear, persuading wealthy old women to buy thousand-dollar silk sets for husbands who were too rich and too old to notice. It gave her a small, steady satisfaction. But no matter what she was doing, no matter the time of day or the distraction at hand, James was always there, somewhere in the back of her mind. She would picture him, imagine how he’d look at her if she were to drop a silk robe and reveal a new lingerie set, something in red lace. He liked red, she remembered.

Chloe’s father had wandered outside to take a work call, though she never understood what he actually did. He said investments, a vague enough term to cover anything. Something about a phone case company he’d put money into—apparently, it was doing well. Who knew. Their conversations were always the same tired script: How are you? Good. How’s work? Fine. Okay, sweetie, I love you. Love you too, Dad.

She wondered if she was being rude to her dad’s girlfriend and felt a flicker of guilt, so she forced herself to make conversation. “Where in Poland are you from?”

“Kłodzko,” the woman said, smiling, her teeth slightly jagged, a little yellow. Chloe couldn’t decide if she was pretty or if she just looked young. With older men, youth seemed to pass as beauty. That was why girls who weren’t particularly attractive ended up with decent-looking much older men; their youth alone made them desirable, Chloe thought.

Her dad returned to the table, but Chloe kept her gaze steady on James, weighing whether to make a run for the bathroom, then deciding she couldn’t. She was too unprepared. She needed a script, a plan. For five long minutes, she stared into her bowl of chili. Then she settled on it: she would catch him by the door as he was leaving, act like she was leaving too. She could be far enough away that her father wouldn’t see.

She’d say she was here on a date, some guy from JP Morgan—yes, that was good. James had always mentioned wanting to get into finance, to work at a place like that. Where was he now? The last she knew, it was insurance, and he’d hated it. Maybe he was still stuck there. She could change things for him, help him out, mention her fictional date and how he could connect James to people, talk shop, whatever.

Of course, that was impossible. She wasn’t on a date. She was here with her father and his mail-order girlfriend.

“Chloe,” her father said. She looked up, his gaze fixed on her with the same concern. How many times had he said her name? How far had she drifted in the last five minutes?

“Sorry,” Chloe replied. “What’s up?”

“Is everything alright?”

“Yes,” she said, a sharpness creeping into her voice. “Everything’s fine, Dad. I’m just tired.”

“Have you not been sleeping?”

“Not really.”

“Why not?” he asked, leaning in as if the answer were something he could pry loose. “Why haven’t you been sleeping well?”

“I have,” Chloe said quickly, already regretting the slip. She should’ve known better than to crack that door open, to let her mental health enter the conversation. She’d been sick once. A very long time ago. There was the cutting, the pills, the therapy sessions that blurred together, all of it a history she’d rather not revisit. The kind of past he only brought up in hushed tones, as if saying it too loudly might call it back to life again.

She saw James flip open the check and slip his card inside. She felt a jolt of dread shoot through her. She had the plan, after all—she’d bring up her imaginary date, the new boyfriend who worked at JP Morgan. But what would she do if James actually asked to meet him? He wouldn’t, she decided. It was just something to smooth over the awkwardness, a filler.

After they broke up two years ago, she’d tried calling, texting, but her messages never went through. She figured he must have changed his number, which was another thing she was planning to ask him for—his new one. She would get his new number, and then they’d start texting again, like before, like the days when they messaged each other constantly. The endless selfies, pictures of whatever meal he was eating, the trips he took with his family—the ones she was never invited on.

Three months, two years ago, and it was still so fresh. It was as if every choice she made had to pass through him first, a silent judge lurking in the background. She kept him in mind when she bought new shoes, when she picked a movie or show, as though he might somehow know, as though it might still matter. She looked for him in every faceless crowd, scanned the subway cars for some sign of his shape, wandered past his apartment building on occasion, her gaze drifting up to the window they used to smoke out of. The window that framed his bed, the one she once lay in, as if the past might flicker back to life there.

It took a while for the bartender to bring the check, and even after that, James still lingered at the bar with a friend she didn’t recognize. Chloe met all the core friends during their three months together—John, Grayson, Charlie. She’d missed them too when he disappeared, missed the easy dynamic, the routine of going over to his place and falling into the rhythm of the group. But this friend was unfamiliar, maybe someone new, maybe visiting from out of town. She took a breath, sipped her Diet Coke.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said, standing up slowly, her heart already picking up speed as she walked toward the bar. She saw him there, pulling on his jacket. She couldn’t wait another second; wasn’t going to stage some awkward meeting by the door like a fool. The restaurant blurred around her—the noise, the children and grandparents, the bad first dates all dissolving into static. She felt her body hum, a vibrating current running through her. She neared him, slowing herself, drawing in a deep breath, then another, until she was hovering just behind him. She reached out, placed a hand on his back, on the familiar fabric of his Patagonia fleece.

“James?” she said.

He turned, and the moment their eyes met, the ground seemed to drop out from under her. It wasn’t him. Her breath caught, the realization slamming into her with a force that made her feel almost dizzy. She made a mistake.

“Wrong person,” the boy said with a laugh.

Her hand slipped away from his back, and she stumbled back a step, heat rising in her cheeks. She could see it now—the differences in his face, the way his eyes crinkled with amusement instead of recognition. But for a moment, it had been him. For a moment, she let herself believe the impossible, let herself fall into the familiarity of wanting something to be what it wasn’t.

She muttered an apology and turned away, her heart pounding in her ears. As she walked back to the table, everything felt off-kilter, like she was moving through a world that had just shifted slightly out of place. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. The past stayed exactly where it was. Unreachable.