The first time I fell in love, I knew before he even approached my doorstep. I hadn’t seen him in ten days and still I ran down the basement stairs to my mother’s office and begged her to feel my forehead. Begged her to tell me if I was going to be sick.

That’s what falling in love felt like: an overwhelming nausea wrapped up inside my tiny body because I hadn’t eaten a real meal in ten days. I sat at Applebees and stared down at my chicken fingers and French fries. The only thing that looked edible on that plate was the ketchup.

He was in a third world country, tending to children in a hospital. And I was in suburban America, complaining to my best friend that the food was too greasy, my stomach too sensitive.

I did not fall in love in Applebees, though. I think that happened somewhere in the middle of the street outside his house, my fingertips wrapped around his ribcage, my best friend’s SUV circling the neighborhood so we could have five more minutes to say goodbye when we’d only just begun to say hello.

When you’re eighteen, you think it’s going to take a century to get to next week. And then it comes, sneaks up on you, and suddenly you’re sitting—no, perching—on your own family room couch arm because you’re afraid to sit next to the boy whose lips touched yours last month. You’re saying something stupid about a movie you grew to hate, a movie that, like your crazy mind, kept coming back to the beginning and starting over.

You’re not in control. You down about sixteen glasses of water both because you think you’re going through menopause and you can’t seem to shake the constant hunger pangs because it’s been weeks since you had a real meal.

And then you’re wondering if you’re going to end up in love forever or just for this week. You’re wondering how much of you you have to give for it to be enough for him. It starts feeling like a bargaining game, like you’ve set up a Monopoly board and you keep landing on his hotels and he keeps wiggling those beautiful fingers at you, waiting for you to fork over a couple hundred dollars to pay for what you didn’t even mean to do.

That’s love. That’s the reason you break up with him and feel bad about it two days later.

So bad you’re sitting in a diner for three hours—three hours?—wondering where you went wrong and suddenly you’re blaming your mother. Yes, your mother. You’re blaming your mother because it’s her fault you fell in love.

It’s the first time we ever said what we wanted to say, the last time we had a conversation that didn’t detour like those roundabouts in New Jersey. It’s a shame it came when we were only six percent through with our relationship. That other ninety-four percent didn’t feel great compared to that one Thursday afternoon.

I don’t think either of us ate dinner that night. I sat on my best friend’s treadmill for half an hour, stretching intervals to pull the taut runway with my feet instead of turning it on. He leaned against her pool table and pretended I didn’t exist.

And I didn’t. Not really.

That was the tip-off. Our healing began with a bodybuilder machine built like a winter sled, me playing around, pulling myself and my friend up, him watching us act absurd. It was like learning to flirt all over again.

And you know what?

I still haven’t figured it out.

But that’s OK. For some reason, that’s totally OK with me. Because I figure I’ll have just as much fun learning with whoever decides to give me my next stomachache.

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