By Maia Brown-Jackson

1. Tell her you need more. You’re both seeing other people but if she asked for more you would stop in a heartbeat. You want love like a story that could bring a dying man back to life because the universe owes you. After everything, you want someone—her— to make you spill out the bullshit and the things hiding in the shadows like a misogynistic doctor practicing bloodletting in 1832. You have baggage: you have too much baggage, but she accepts it. She accepts you. And you’re brave today— maybe it’s the wine— or was it whiskey?— and you tell her. And she doesn’t know what to do.
2. Meet someone who fights to earn you. Who fights to keep you. Tell her. Tell her how sorry you are. Explain in abstruse metaphors and broken sentences, because it’s the only way you know how. Don’t say you still love her because you don’t want to make this any harder and you know this already hurts and you can’t give her hope because there’s nothing that can break a heart like hope. Let this new person adore you, tell you how brilliant you are, how beautiful and strange and lovely. Let yourself believe it in a way you wouldn’t have been able to before her.
3. Let him fall for you because you’re desperate for a love that makes you forget what it was to hunger. Swallow as much of it as you can stomach. Tell him you feel the same because you don’t know what else to say, and you do care, and you want him to feel happy. (Hate yourself for giving him hope and don’t think too hard about what’s different this time, what’s wrong with your heart, why you’re saying these things.)
4. Become enamored of a stray cat. Convince him (too easily) to take it in for you. Text her, just to check in, joke about how you’re still adopting strays. Slowly start to talk again. Keep it light. Don’t mention him. Wonder if she’s dating, too. Hate yourself a little bit for the hypocrisy of caring.
5. Break up with him. Finally. He deserves better. Let him keep the cat.
6. See her again. It’s like old times. Kiss her in a dive bar. Take day trips in her red jeep and drink too much on her roof with her arm around your shoulders and sneak out each morning to buy two cappuccinos because you always wake up too early for her. Don’t let yourself think about how easy this all feels. 
7. Wonder if this time, she’s going to tell you that she needs more. You’ve never been able to stay still, to settle, and she’s never been able to ask you to stay. There might be someone else and the timing is never quite right. You were only ever casually in love, after all. Or at least that’s all either of you would ever admit. But she can’t seem to ask you and you realize she can’t do this forever, just like you couldn’t. Every couple gets the same two options: you stay together or you don’t, and you two aren’t a miraculously grey exception. You learned long ago that love was never enough in this world; how could you let yourself forget?
8. Shock at this new shade of heartbreak when you set her free (chickenshit).
9. Wait until talking doesn’t press directly on the bruise she left. Start to wonder if your friends are right and you were an idiot. You were too raw to trust and she was always terrible at communication. But. She waited for you. You flitted from place to place and adventure to adventure, and she was always there when you came back. It was you who was unpredictable. Everyone could see she had been mad over you for years except for you. You and your baggage. You and your stupid, overly-protective brain and the military fortress around your heart and a steadfast refusal to believe that someone could love you despite despite despite. Maybe if your heart hadn’t grown so calloused, a knee-jerk reaction to a lifetime of believing in magic fucking decimated, your innocence hacked at with a goddamn machete by someone you eventually had to accept was just a man and not a monster, you might have let yourself hope that just this once the universe would give you the fairytale ending. If you’d just let yourself let go of the iron-fisted control over your own heart and offered it up one more time—
10. Let time pass. (It doesn’t matter. It isn’t going to.) Recognize you’re still a bit in love with her. Know you always will be.

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Maia Brown-Jackson is a Pushcart-nominated, award-winning writer whose second poetry collection, Gifted, opens for pre-orders this autumn with Nymeria Publishing. In her spare time, she volunteers with a Yazidi NGO, occasionally studies quantum physics, and wastes time with the world’s sweetest, clumsiest cat.