Our bodies are Churchill in the face of Hitler. We rest at Dunkirk awaiting our saviours, and we do not accept resolution that results in capitulation of our hopes.

You wake up in the morning, lips bleeding, blood on the pillow with memories of a broken goodbye. “Just get in,” she says as she tells the driver where to go. You’re a visitor in a foreign land where your only commonality with her is a newfound sense of empathy—something that’s fully unimportant to the taxi man. He drives. She walks away.

But still she hated me. I wasn’t fat, and she didn’t understand why I would like someone that was. At that age, I didn’t realize what was going on, that the knotty feeling in my gut whenever she got mad was the sign of a burgeoning love.

But between the wining and dining, between the sheets and kisses, we were left wondering—there was always a lingering distance that made us feel apart. The tendency to fall is easy, but the glue that sticks never comes at a discount.

There is an older song, one the lady at the bar sings to me when I stumble in before close. It’s a lullaby that eases me into the night, cause I’m that baby and she’s the mother who wants to make sure I get home safe.

You think you’ll go years without hearing their voice, move and find a way to discover a new you. You wish that old part of you gets outdated, a relic resembling a computer glitch that some kid fixed at a Best Buy. But then you get the text: “Happy birthday.”

There’s a hazy wonder that strikes a being when lust turns into passion, when wantonness redefines itself as love. That line is as delicate as truth is from fiction, and those memories remain stained in our veins until the end of our days.

I’d never been able to grasp some basic things in life, about love and caring, about compassion and empathy. I tried to calculate them into formulas, tried to reciprocate in return, but there were things I could just never grasp. But for her, this had become a joke. It’s just like she had said: A broken fucking record.