Being in love is the grandest, most powerful feeling in the world. I list here the different ways it made me feel in the past year:

1. It makes you forget.
When you share something so powerful with someone, and if you truly fall in love, you will forget all of the men in your past. They will become objects of apathy to you; their names will no longer make your heart beat faster or sink or stir any emotion except maybe regret.

2. You find answers.
My journal puts it simply: “Apart from you, my world consists of questions. With you, my world is an answer; I am one, simple, ultimate answer: ‘yes’; even without words, you solve every puzzle within me.”

3. Thoughts of him become a velvet, broad, heavy stage curtain
which you must lift every morning to make way for the day, which feels like an ornate or tedious play.

4. You feel possessed.
A poem I once wrote:

I love you with a thousand demons.

Legion, am I
For we are demons
and we are many.

I love you with a thousand demons.

Perhaps I am sick
but we are immortal.
Unto death, unto death,

I love you with a thousand demons.

Perhaps we belong in pigs.
We suit those.
But we are stronger here.

I love you with a thousand demons.

5. You love mostly with imagination.
The one you love is rarely him, really. He is created in your mind, and little things that he does become large explanations and symbolic indicators for more qualities that make him even greater in your mind. The second time I saw him, he was ordering a coffee and a brownie from Blue State. I loved him then for his sweet tooth, which I thought all men should have. It was ridiculous, but that’s what love does. It idealizes people.

6. You become simultaneously passive and active.
You have never felt more helpless in your life. You feel as though you lack all agency as you wait and wait and wait every moment for him to acknowledge you. But while you wait, you try your best to grab his attention, even when you’re alone — in the little ways you know he will never see.

7. You feel maternal.
All you want is to hold him in your arms, cradle his head, stroke his back, and hear him divulge his greatest insecurities, his greatest fears, his broken relationships.