I hope that reading my writing makes you feel like I've just given you a hug. If it doesn't, e-mail me, and I'll have to give you one in person.

I went to the ocean because I wanted to feel small. Even though I grew up less than an hour from the coast, my family was never really one for the beach, so we only took a handful of vacations there. I spent the last four years of my life on an island and never once went swimming–the rivers that flank Manhattan reek of chemicals, and Coney Island was a seemingly endless subway ride away. But San Francisco is a place that is so tied to the sea that the slightest shifting of the earth’s crust could send the entire city sliding right into it. Yesterday I rented a car and I drove across the city, up and over Twin Peaks, through the Inner Sunset and along the southern edge of Golden Gate Park, until the road dead ended and all I could see was the ocean. I wanted to look out at its vastness and feel swallowed, the same way one might when gazing intently at the night’s sky. I’m drawn to the sea’s impermanence: nothing remains, everything shifts and erodes. I went to the ocean because I wanted to feel alive in a way that only being humbled can evoke.

The night before, I had drinks with Jeff in a bar by my apartment where the beers are only $4 and everyone smokes cigarettes inside. There is a pool table against the back wall, and the cue kept cutting into Jeff’s chair. He moved onto the bench with me and suddenly there was nothing that could have stopped us then.

“I don’t think we should have sex,” he said. “I think that’s the right decision,” I replied. But just as the words left my mouth he leaned in, touched my cheek and kissed me. Because I was desperately lonely or desperately nostalgic, I let him.

Afterwards, breath snagging raggedly in my chest, I looked at the spot on the wall above his scalp for three whole minutes. I thought about everything that he had done to me: how he had broken up with me on April Fool’s Day, and when I texted my roommate the news he didn’t believe me for three hours until he returned home and found me crumpled in a heaving ball. How my Dad had to drive into the city to collect me because I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep and I needed to be in a place where the buildings weren’t so crushed together. I needed to feel uncrushed. I cried so hard at midnight in my Dad’s car, looking out at the people stumbling down Broadway, through the Holland Tunnel, that when we got to New Jersey we pulled over at a rest stop so that I could throw up in the parking lot. Every night for weeks I woke up in the middle of the night convinced he was beside me, and would break out into sobs when I realized I was alone. Later, I told him all of these things, not because I wanted him to feel guilty, but because they were part of something crucial that he had done to me, something that subtly changed how I am with him and with everyone else.

And when those three minutes were over and the scenes of April and May had stopped playing in my head, I snapped back to the bar and I adjusted my gaze and I leaned in and kissed him right back. He stayed the night. The next day we went to the beach, and we shivered and built castles and scratched messages into the sand.

It is the easiest thing in the world to fall back in love with someone. Certain gestures or ticks of speech he made stirred a familiar sense of affection in me, and it was overwhelming. To be with him again, to let my dignity fall to the wayside in the name of love or its echo, is the easy and familiar thing. It is the option most attractive while I continue to flounder about in a city where I still only know a handful of people and I have yet to actually take the Muni and I’m scared to walk around my neighborhood alone after dark. He is my creature comfort, and I realize that I am falling in love again not with him, but with the feeling of safety he brings me. The feeling that I am a person worth loving, that I don’t have to search any longer, that there is no reason to be afraid of loneliness anymore. So he kisses my neck the way he used to and I count the freckles in his irises the way I used to and we stand on my front porch holding hands and I say, “We can’t do this. I gave you a choice and you chose her.” We both shrug and sigh, hollowed by the choices we have made.

Things could have been different, effortless even–it’s this idea that haunts us. “In a perfect world, she would have never contacted you, and you would want kids, and we would get married,” I said. He smiled sweetly and cupped my head in the crook of his elbow.

But this is not a perfect world, and he devastated me in a way that I could never holistically recover from. Our attempts to repair what is broken between us will only winnow us further. Some things aren’t meant to be fixed, and what we have done to each other has distorted the pieces so dramatically that nothing, not even neck kisses or the smell of the Pacific, could ever reassemble us. There are some choices that you can’t take back and there are some people that you will never recover from but it is crushing how easy it is to forget all that when he puts his lips to my forehead.

Laying in bed as he got dressed, I looked at him with brimming eyes. “It’s a shame,” I whispered. “What is?” he replied, running his thumb over my temple before tugging on his socks.

I smiled faintly, nostalgically.

“That we can’t be together ever again.”

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