What It’s Like With A New Love

It’s early in the morning – probably about 3 AM, though I can’t see much further than the bed to tell from the windows or a phone, since I don’t have my glasses on. He thinks it’s funny how blind I am and it is kind of funny, though it would be nice to wake up to an unblurred world. I don’t remember what the world looked like when I didn’t need my vision tweaked. I’ve been wearing glasses since I was six, so I don’t know anything different.

It’s early in the morning and his room is dark and cool. The air conditioner in the window is humming and leaking its coolant onto the floor. We’ve alternated between wrapping ourselves up in each other and pushing away to sleep on our own sides. I twist and turn and toss and thrash in my sleep. I sweat, even though I need more than my fair share of blankets all night long. I wake up a thousand times. He doesn’t seem to mind, bless him. He just pulls me close and holds me there and keeps me from turning circles again and again.

I need that, and he gives it.

New love is chaotic. You rearrange your life for it, you categorize the way you feel, you talk about it at length. You bend a little to make way for them, emotionally and physically. You let this person in, give them access to every single part of you – the way you look without your eyebrows drawn on, the messy corner of your bedroom where you throw that day’s clothes, the text messages that make you cry when you’re sitting at dinner, that wordy blindside in a blue box. You laugh, you bicker, you spend hours together and you learn how to be quiet with each other.

I always forget, when I’m in the midst of some messy breakup or the slow death march of a mediocre relationship, how scary and fun and beautiful something new can be. New love is surprising, how quickly it can take over your world and draw big bubbly teenage hearts on your wrists and over every surface of your life.

You become a resident of a city when you start calling its news stations and anchors your own, when they become more familiar to you than the ones you left behind. You become a part of a place when you don’t need Google Maps to get around, when you know how to take the back roads when traffic clogs up.

You become a part of someone else when you don’t have to ask him what he’s thinking anymore. You just know.

I am someone who writes about her life for the Internet, who tosses her messy casseroles of emotions out there for anyone to read. If you’re part of my life in any significant way, I’ll write about you; maybe I’ll hide it, sneakily, or maybe I’ll just curse your name in a piece that you’ll never be able to deny is about you. “Thanks for all the money I made off our relationship,” I once told an ex post-breakup. If it happened to me, it’s mine.

But for the moment, I am keeping him under lock and key. This feels too sacred to post on Instagram. I’ve always kept boyfriends off of my social media channels; the little moments I share with them are best kept in my brain, not posted and “liked” by my circles. I’d rather hold it all close to my heart for now.

Sometimes, he wakes up early in the morning and goes to work out. I can tell he doesn’t want to, that he wants to stay here with my sleeping form and fold himself back into me, but he does it because he needs to. He’s good like that, and I am not. I stay half-awake, waiting for his key to jingle in the door.

He gets back into bed and curls up against me and holds me tight. In the winter, he’ll come home cold and I’ll be here, warm and waiting. But I don’t think about that right now, because even though it’s October winter feels far away. Instead, when he holds me and kisses my neck and syncopates his breathing to mine, I think about something I saw on my friend’s refrigerator one day. “Think about your heart being filled with pink light,” her healer instructed her in writing. “Focus on it in every morning and every night.”

And that’s how mine feels, right now.