Late during my first year of college, I fell for someone super hard. He wasn't handsome in a regular guy way. He was tall and gawky and silent. He had a shock of blonde unruly hair and intense blue eyes and something about him said something to me. So I fell hard and that was okay for awhile. It was drama and excitement and difficult and awesome. But maybe it was too much drama. Or I fell too hard or he didn't fall hard enough or his friends didn't like me... I surely blamed them at the time. So it didn't last and then I was alone again.

Almost more clearly than any moment with him, I can remember lying in my bed in the dorm staring at the ceiling thinking, "Why isn't there someone to love me?" Poor little first world white girl in her warm clean bed in her prestigious college staring at the ceiling sharing the same thought with no doubt a million people around the world in cots and mats and beds and futons, all staring at the same ceiling that isn't really a ceiling at all but just the not there you look at when you can't stop thinking the thoughts you don't want to think.

Selfish selfish me. How many times can I pretend that he isn't dying only to have more confirmation that he is? And every time I stare at that ceiling and have that same selfish thought. When he's gone, who is going to love me? And I remember that memory that is stronger now than any memory of that first silly fall and I tremble in fear. The alone is so much bigger than the together in my memory. I don't want to go back to that, I don't want to forget the together.