I miss her.

I hate missing her this much. What the fuck is wrong with me? I know I shouldn’t, she doesn’t feel it, but damn I feel it. Us was rare.

The struggle I’ve had in explaining to my friends why this stings is the rarity of her attitude. Her strength, her bravery, her adventurism, her humor, and her grace. In addition to the genius she clearly possesses.

She is not without imperfections. She is full of mistakes and the vibrancy of a real human being. What makes her special to me is that she is worth forgiving.

We’ll get there.

Today, I was overwhelmed by the silence. The not knowing. The missing her. So… I ran into her.

It was actually by accident. I had wanted to see if she were in her math class (I half expected she wouldn’t be) but I was early to the class. As I was walking away from the classroom she saw me in the hallway.

We stopped. We spoke. She seemed eager to escape, heavily referencing the math paperwork in her hands and saying she really needed to go study it because it was actually hard.

Still, we managed to eek out a bit of a conversation. I guess? We were both exhausted.

She corrected my misinterpretation of her exhaustion (I didn’t assume she was up all weekend banging away… but it seemed entirely possible). She said it was her sister who kept her up.

As she stood in the hallway she kept avoiding my gaze. It stung. I asked about her phone and she said she still didn’t have one. This seemed incredibly impossible, how could she keep in touch with the new guy without a phone?

She was making do, I guess.

I only asked one question about Prince Charming. “How was the Ramen date?” and she lowered her head and grinned ridiculously. She was flushed with excitement. It was clearly really good, she needn’t have said more. I didn’t expect anything else, though she felt compelled to explain that good dates don’t have to end with sex.

As if I didn’t know that? I responded quickly, that I knew that, I had a number of dates with her that didn’t end that way, that I really enjoyed.

She asked why I was exhausted. I explained that I had been doing a lot of thinking and writing.

“About what?”

“About me.” I figured the “her” was implied. She’s on my mind all the time right now but she chuckled as if it weren’t. I explained that I was trying to spend some time with myself to figure things out. I wanted to understand more.

She became defensive, “I haven’t done anything wrong. You were just fishing for things that I’ve done wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong.” It was sort of unexpected, I hadn’t brought that up. She said, “You’re doing what you always do.”

It was strange because I’ve never done this. I’ve hurt like this, sure. I’ve written a great deal about how I felt, about how much it hurt, about how I thought the girl was making a huge mistake and didn’t realize how I cared about her. I wrote about the stories from my perspective…

But I’ve never attempted to really examine what happened, in depth. I’ve never looked back at the history, never gone over old messages, tried to really understand what she was thinking and what specifically got fucked up.

And how that might be related to other things in my life. I fully expect this self-examination to expand beyond her but right now. The pain, the motivation is the heart-searing pain of loss. It’s the starting point, the open wound.

It seems like as good a starting point as any, especially because I haven’t cared about someone like this in so very long. She touched me, deeper than anyone I’ve met to date.

God, I hope that’s hyperbole — because I don’t just mean it physically or metaphorically, it’s this combination that remains inexplicable to me. I don’t know how she made me feel how I felt.

We stood in the hallway. I watched her, she shuffled, looking away.

She hadn’t done anything wrong at all. I explained that I wasn’t trying to blame her but it also didn’t seem right to heap all the blame on myself, that it was more complicated than that.

And she rolled her eyes so hard the people at the end of the hallway probably thought she was about to pass out. I smiled, I loved when she did that — she acts like it was painfully obvious (it’s complicated) even though she had just simplified it down to say it was all my fault. I fucked up, as she put it.

I didn’t actually come to fight or discuss that all. I had come to make sure she was okay. She was, she was better than okay and I have no sway over her heart any longer.

I have no sway over heart any longer. Do I?

Does it matter?