To Bryan (space boy, frog boy, boy of my dreams)

MoMA in summer, August 12

I was looking somewhere, diagonally right, when you put both hands on my shoulders. I can feel them still, sitting dazedly in Times Square, night wind just touching the tip of my spine. You put both hands on my shoulders, turned me around and led me like a dancer would (that is, according to my imagination, both gentle and firm) left three steps.
Do you see it?
Straight in front of me, through two pillars, in between a layered crowd, is Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

Next, in a room of Monet, the caption ended “…a reminder that art can be a soothing balm for the soul.”

Open shoulders to let me in. Open, shyly intersecting shoulders so we can come close, so we can peer politely at each other, as children do. I think about how to stop unravelling, about my registered steps for “recalibration” like my friends said to do. I try to focus but as usual the surfaces of things get about and away with my attention: the green of lilies, the bareness at closing time, sun, Monet, Klimt, accidents, hands, flipbooks.
I collapse into myself because here is a way of handling that I have never felt before.

First Date, September 16

The things I need to capture:

1. Waiting for our table at High Street on Market. Listening to the sound of your heart inside your chest, tiptoeing to speak into your ear, smiling at the man in the trench coat, smiling at the cook with the moustache, being held like that in warmth and woody-ness and dim lighting and white noise. Listening to the rumble of your voice when you spoke to the waitress. She smiled at me and I smiled back because look at this, look how lucky I am in this place at this time. Look how simple this scene is, how singularly we exist, how classic. Ali Smith in How to Be Both wrote, “I remember it, the way the game of love makes the rest of the world disappear.” We celebrate that this is possible.

2. Later that night, lying, eyes closed, on the upper edge of your chest. Listening to you sing Sinatra, being so close to your voice. Word after word falling out and me trying so hard to keep still. I wanted to caress something, to kiss something or to laugh or to smile. But I couldn’t because here was one beautiful, beautiful, gentle thing, maybe the nicest thing I’ve ever been allowed to see, maybe the tenderest thing I’ve ever been invited to. This isn’t something for me to touch. I hold my breath until you’re done, then I promise, for all the lonely girls I’ve been before, to remember this forever.

October 22

You see, I get it now when they say it hurts. It’s not pettiness or validation or anything straightforward like that. It’s this goddamn vulnerability. It’s when you need someone in a room for it to feel full. When you love and you love and you stop seeing the end so it’s just a fucking scary acceleration to the point of infinity. It’s the disappointment and self-loathing you crawl into when you realize you haven’t kept yourself at all. You’ve forgotten how to fall asleep without him around you.

That the shape and sound of a person can decide when and where you feel OK, is the most alarming, most unfair provision of this whole exasperating business.

October 31

She was anxious—a frowning mess of birth control, mid-terms, and general insecurity. She was trying so hard to hide it but he carried her off her chair and onto the bed. They lay there, listening to mazzy star. He lifted her up, smoothed out each wrinkle, brushed away locks of hair until she was all there again. In a two-by-four meter room, with a window and a door at each end, they held each other in a bed that took up more than half the room, doing nothing, saying nothing, guitar piping sweetly from a corner. Maybe an hour passed, they missed their dinner reservation. Outside, browning leaves gathered in the wind, saying shhhhh.

—By Rebecca T., 19, Singapore