my undying cynicism of people’s intentions will one day be the death of me. it is a sort of cautious suspicion that appears to be rather useful artillery in this dog-eat-dog world that spins on an axis of the survival of the fittest… but as my own history will tell me — and i’m sure the history of many others out there — such artillery is only useful if it comes with some sort of a compass. it is an ongoing theme in my life: i am constantly trusting all the worst friends (people), and subjecting the ones who love me most to an increasingly harrowing gauntlet of tests. it’s not that i don’t love them too. in most cases i think i love them more than they love me. but it’s almost like i can’t quite understand why they love me, and why they are here in my life. it’s sort of why girls love asking their perplexed (and often frustrated) boyfriends why he loves her. ‘i just do’ doesn’t quite cut it. it’s not that we’re vain, or stirring shit – we just want to know if you really know who we are. ‘because you’re cute, pretty, smart, kind’ doesn’t cut it either. every 5th girl on the street probably has that combination and there’s nothing at all amazing about it, as well as nothing thoughtful about such an analysis. someone once told me that he knew he loved her when she yelled at him for not registering to vote. i thought that was all kinds of wonderful, even if she made him sleep on the couch for a night.

i knew i loved him when:

1 – he canceled a date with me at the last possible minute to help his mother with grocery shopping

2 – we were looking at shooting stars outside my house, in the restless night, and he ‘gave’ me two shooting stars because i was sad that i’d spotted two less shooting stars than he had

3 – the 7th or so time that he came home to get me for lunch, and it occurred to me that this was going to happen every day for as long as we both wanted

4 – as we were breaking up, in the yellow cab, i moved to kiss him on the cheek and he turned away and said, please don’t do that