It wasn’t love at first sight, at least not for me. It felt more like reading a new book, every page pulling me deeper. Falling for him was a slow liberation, an invitation into a safe haven. It was like being enveloped in a tight, comforting hug, his arms wrapping around me with love, his kisses warming my heart to its very centre.

He smells like summer and his eyes resemble the pearly sight of water’s surface on a warm sunny day. When you find yourself recycling your journal papers into clean beige paper and writing about him with cherry ink, know that you're doomed. There’s no going back.

I have to cross the road to get to the café where we’re supposed to meet. Everything that moves can and will kill you. I feel the shiver in my spine.

I love coffee. He doesn’t.

“Lemon tea?” he asks.

“Sure,”

Falling in love with him is like watching the purple dawn sky with glitters, waiting for the moon. It’s like finding someone with a spare jacket when you’re drowning deep in the water. He is also in the water, gasping for breath, gasping to hand me the jacket.

I remember the day we were lying on his bed after a long day. My hands on his chest, eyes on his wood eyes. I played Krishna.

“I don't believe in god,” he said.

“I like to believe that there’s someone over me I can count on,” I replied.

He is someone I can count on. He doesn’t understand. As I sip lemon tea, I taste nothing but the ocean in a sip. Something so calm yet so sour. He drowns a sugar cube into the cup while I stare at the dark circles under his eyes. He has trouble falling asleep after he tucks me into bed.

I love it when he wears grey. His closet is full of black clothes. He needs colour. He needs love. He needs to crack his shell. He looks at me like I’m the girl on the movie screen. He stares into my eyes like they’re hollow, like they need his eyes.

He talks like a book. He writes like love is red and vanilla chocolates. I love myself, when people I love, love me back. Late evenings, we go to the café. He orders his lemon drink. They have ice cubes floating, gasping for air. I always put one in my mouth after he finishes it. Putting an ice cube inside your mouth until it melts diverts your body’s response away from anxiety or panic. Today I asked for iced coffee. I love coffee. Now he loves coffee.

Every one of my cells loves him. Every day, my body creates trillions of new cells. And I love him a trillion times more every day. But everything that you love, you will eventually lose, there is no other version of this story.

“If one of us leaves, I'll forget how to breathe,” he says.

“One of us has to leave. There’s no other version of this story,” I say as I feel my veins being pulled apart.

“How can you love someone and let them go?”

My heart skips a beat and my eyes drift like the winter wind as I think of leaving. The conversation stops. I can still feel the birds chirping and the leaves brushing, which means the conversation is still on. Only the words aren’t being used. We were too tired to speak but sat next to each other. I am fluent in silence.

A week after, I acted as if I had put myself back together again, so quickly, so easily. After seeing him, on my way home, I watched the sunset in my rear-view mirror while hustling in the traffic. I thought of him.

“When can we meet again?” he asks before I do.

“You’re too clingy,” I brush it off.

When Mitch Albom said, “It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it,” I listened to him. I have started getting out of bed. I have started dusting my cycle which has been sitting in the garage for an eternity. I used to ride it before I got sick.

When I taste his lips, I feel his heart beating against mine. I feel his systole and diastole pressure crumbling inside him, building a piercing pressure to beat outside his chest.

I remember the day we went to the bookstore and picked out every classic there. From Sylvia Plath to Rabindranath Tagore, we shuffled every page. The air smelled like vanilla and roses. I sat on the redwood floor and he stood there, holding my hemp bag, falling in love with books all over again.

When you think you can’t fall for the same person over and over again, he will prove you wrong. Every. Single. Time. It’s like reading Judy Blume’s book on a hot summer day. It makes you fall in love with life and lemonades and summer.

Pushing his ears against my heart feels like holding a little boy. He was somebody’s little boy. Somebody’s everything in 2005. Like he needed to hold somebody while he saw the large blue truck pass as he crossed the street. Like he needed the red ink to write it down.

Then he grew up. We started setting boundaries. Considering throwing ourselves off a cliff or swallowing a bottle of pills over inconveniences from the invisible boundaries. He started putting stuff back on the shelves. He never learned to put stuff into his cart.

When I told him I was sick, I saw his pupils dilate.

“No, my baby is fine,” he said as I heard his voice scatter. It was his world.

I watched him appreciate himself a little. I watched him put stuff in his cart that wasn’t beer. I watched him buy shirts that weren’t black. I watched him in the rear-view mirror while he drove me to my appointments. That day, I saw the little boy in him grow. One day spent with someone you love can change everything.

I drive to the café, carefully passing the obstructed traffic. I stand holding myself. A blue truck with jars of drinking water passes my sight. There he is. The sight of him holding the beige paper hit a nerve somewhere in me.

And I realise when I look at him, I am looking at the purest love I’ll ever know.

“I hate the sun,” I complain.

I want him to go inside and breathe slower. I want to hold his heart and glue it together and then give it back to him so that he can cherish it like it was in 2005 and he’s four.

“Shall we cool it off with an iced lemonade?” he asks.

“Can we have lemon tea?”

"Sure."