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I do not want to be the reason you start believing in forever and all the fucking cliches of your first relationship again.

I cannot be the person who catches you every time a flood consumes you — you need to learn how to swim.

Love is easy, but, in heartbreak you cannot place the emotions you have for someone in another and expect it to be the same.

You probably love someone so hard right now that the ground shakes under your feet because it can tell by the way your shadow sways like it’s drunk that you’re very much in love. Even your cells started sending love letters through every neuron and synapse to each individual part of your body; the tips of your fingers have X’s and O’s written on them in invisible ink. You are so in love it hurts.

The only problem is that the recipient of these feelings, these unending physical aches, is either taken or unreceptive. They go to the cleaners to get suits ironed for the women they will come home to that are not you; they eat spaghetti and meatballs in dim restaurants with low-quality wine while secretly holding hands with someone who is also coincidentally not you.

You have to start learning how to enter a room without worrying, or maybe hoping, that they will be in it. You have to get away from their invisible presence, the way their atoms cling to your sweater sleeves and make you feel dizzy. It is said there are five stages of grief, but no one ever talks about the different kinds of grief you’ll have to go through to let go of someone whom you love dearly but will never be yours. You’ll have to go through all the possible combinations and versions, maybe some of them infinite, in order to move on.

There’s the My memory has a checkout line that always wants to keep you on the conveyer belt kind of grief, the I’d rather die than not see you anymore kind, the Why are you with her when you could be with me kind of grief. Your heart will feel like it’s been through a cheese grater and then doused in salt and vinegar simultaneously. You will feel like hell, or maybe even start to think you’ve actually arrived there several decades early.

But a haircut is just a haircut. It was not for the purpose of impressing you; in truth, this person probably notices you on average only 1/5 the number of times you notice them on a daily basis. So you need to start taking the other route to the bus stop or the office or even the deli, the route that does not involve catching a glimpse of them through the window or sitting in their cubicle. You need to stop ordering vanilla lattes at Starbucks exactly when you know they’ll be working behind the counter.

Forget their handwriting. Stop memorizing the way they dot their i’s or how their h’s always look too much like n’s. Focus on the ugly things instead- the bad morning breath, their refusal to apologize for hurtful utterances or lost arguments, maybe even how they always forget to throw away the used coffee filters. Try to remember that they are not perfect. They, too, have belly fat and creaky knees that may need surgery a few years early.

The moon was once jealous of the sun for loving the earth so stubbornly, but then the night sky came and devoured it whole. If you don’t stop this now, you too will be eaten alive by unreciprocated feelings. It is not selfish nor is it wrong to get some “me time,” to lock yourself in your room and turn on music without lyrics that will help de-clutter your mind. Breathe deeply. Letting go does not come at once or after a walk around the block; it normally comes after a cross-country trek or roadtrip around the world. Allow yourself the luxury of taking it slow.

Step by step, erase them from your memory. Throw away the eighth-grade concert ticket they gave you on a whim, the rainbow paperclips from your first school project together. Don’t touch the doorknobs they turned anymore or re-trace their steps in the hallway on the way to French class. Go your own way. Allow yourself the kinds of nights where all you feel like doing is eating an entire tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream alone in your dorm room, or watching reruns of Friends in your footie pajamas.

Forgiveness is hard. Forgetting is even worse.

There will always be people in your life who will take your heart when you hand it to them and will squash it in their fists until it turns into a bloody pulp. There will always be someone who will never notice you no matter how painfully visible you make yourself. That’s the sad truth.

But the other universal truth is that there will always be the one person who takes your heart in their hands when you offer it like a gift and will treat it as if it’s made of glass, who will not drop it no matter how heavy it gets.

Listen. If you’re quiet enough, you can hear the sound of matter, space, and time all existing simultaneously. It sounds almost like the universe had been holding a giant breath for eons and only just now let it out. The exhale is just the grace note before you start to fall, over the edge of that universe and into the dark energy and whirling galaxies above and below and beyond. The exhale is just the beginning of a feeling that could stretch to the ends of the earth.

You’re going to fall asleep tonight, and when you wake up you’ll realize that sleep isn’t just sleep anymore. It’s the pause, the rest before waking up, when the feeling comes back like a rush and you get high all over again from the intensity of it.

You will look at someone like they are an apocalypse and all you want is to step into their path and be destroyed in the best way possible. It sounds terrifying, but of course any hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, or fire and brimstone would be. They will utterly demolish every beam and brick and stairwell of the deepest parts of yourself that you tried so hard to build into something strong and able to withstand any kind of storm.

You’re not a bomb shelter anymore. This will blow you apart.

Everything about this person will become a series of snapshots winding their way throughout your daily life; as you make breakfast and burn the toast or cook the eggs too runny, every moment you spend without them will be like dying twenty times all in one minute, like a car crash, house fire, gas tank explosion all at once. The thought of their newest haircut or how they never notice the eyelashes that drift down onto their cheek will make your knees shake so badly it seems like early-onset arthritis.

Trust me; you are going to cry so hard you make yourself sick. You are going to want to pull your bloody aching heart out of your chest and hold it out to everybody like a game of show-and-tell; it will feel like a ticking time bomb. You are going to be emotionally immature and unstable in countless ways, in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. You will stop dead in the middle of bakeries and repeat this person’s name over and over again to yourself as impatient customers line up behind you, jostling for pastries. Your common sense will turn itself off like a security fence.

Maybe this is one of those feelings that’s even better than falling asleep in warm sheets on a cold winter night, or visiting a foreign country in which a stranger presses a fig into your palm, looks into your eyes, and there’s a moment of understanding between you so solid every particle of their gaze freezes like ice. Maybe this is one of those feelings that fucks you up so badly you start drinking about this person instead of just thinking about them. Maybe they’ll walk into your dreams without knocking but there are so many doors to step through that you start wondering if they’ll ever find their way out of your head.

Maybe this is one of those feelings a hoarder would gladly replace all the takeout cartons and wrinkled newspapers in their apartment with just because it would fill the entire room anyway.

But all this, this weakness, these shaking hands and beating heart, are so wonderfully, exquisitely human. No one said you had to feel at ease all the time or always be three steps inside your comfort zone. Because when you fall in love, you’ll be about fifty feet outside of it, and sometimes you might even forget how to use a knife and fork properly in front of this person. No one said you had to remember or be perfect all the time.

Maybe there will be some nights when no talking is required, when even breathing makes too much noise, and the only thing that’s needed is to climb into bed with all the covers on and hide under them like you did when you were a child and got caught reading with the flashlight on after lights out, because being in love is like getting caught spilling a secret.