Eliot Rose

Speaking of, he took down his OKCupid profile after our first date; I took mine down after our third. But is that really the sign of, well, anything? I feel like I’m living inside a SomeEcard: “Babe, you make me want to deactivate my online dating profile.”

We’re a growing breed, the adult runaways. We’ve left behind jobs, guys and/or girls, the West Coast, and more recently, the State of New Jersey, in the name of opportunity — have abandoned apathy and quicksand for independence and skyscrapers.

In the summer in the small Southern California town where I grew up, it’s 115 degrees on a good day – and the most bristling, face-melting day I can remember exploded the thermometer at 123.

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before. A writer understands the capacity for words to embolden, to eviscerate, to cut a man in half.

The words spill out of my lips and course through my fingertips and, I promise, I promise, they’ll find their way to you. Ask me instead why I stay here, why my arms are still open.

By dint of our labor, we cultivated agency. We took liberties. I busied myself with your skin, buried myself in your hair and clutched it tightly while other bits of me were trembling. You made me believe in gestures more powerful than prayer.

And this is why we never last. Because I don’t defer—not to you, not to your opinions, not to a belief system based on anything but coexistence. Because I won’t tell you I love you so you can clasp that love around my neck and use it to take me for a walk around the block. Because I have opinions, and you’re not always right. Most of the time, I am.