I don’t know what love is. Maybe I was never taught properly, or maybe it’s something that you just have to go out and find for yourself. I can’t say how it’s supposed to be learned, but I can say I don’t know what love is. I know about crushes, about infatuation, about objectively pretty people. I know about meet-cutes, about first dates, about riding off into the sunset. But if anyone were to sit me down and ask me to be together for the rest of our lives, I think that I would tell them no. When I picture my ‘happy ending’, my perfect life, I am always alone, and the solitude would give me an immense feeling of peace. Of course I’d have a pet for some company, but I would rise and fall to an otherwise empty house. 

Why the image of myself sitting alone on a porch, drinking coffee, comes instantly to mind doesn’t make perfect sense to me, however, because I don’t like being alone. Fundamentally, I don’t think many humans do. We are social creatures, at heart. When it’s late at night, and I’m lying awake, I think about all the people I used to talk to. People who I never thought I’d have to live without because they were always there.

As young girls, my friends and I would talk about living in one big house together. We would all work near each other and never be apart because we were best friends forever. Even as we grew older, the core of this idea stayed. We’d go to the same college, or drop out of college together, and live in the same apartment to afford rent. Maybe we wouldn’t have much, but there would always be each other. 

 When did my happy ending change from being surrounded by friends to living in a small cabin in the woods with… no one? 

I have so many questions for the older me, the one who will be rocking silently in an old wooden chair, steaming mug in hand, and staring longingly into the woods. I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she feels something again, until she looks at me, and then I’ll ask her, 

“Why am I so content to be alone when I know that it hurts? Am I really that apathetic to my own happiness? That scared of interpersonal connection?”

I’ll ask her, “Where did my friends go?” 

And she’ll hear the unspoken yet crucial ‘was it my fault?’ that gets stuck in my throat. When she finally looks me in the eye, I’ll see the truth. When I wear that weathered face and gaze into the mirror in the morning, old eyes meeting their like, then I’ll know. Maybe the answer will be that it’s better this way, it’s really not all that bad, and I don’t even miss people. 

Or maybe she’ll whisper, “This was always destined to be, child, and no matter how horrible it may seem, it will happen and you will learn to live through it,”

She’ll clutch me tightly, and tell me the truth; I deserve that much at least. She’ll say that somewhere along the line, between my hometown and here, I left that part of me behind. The little girl whose friends held her when she had a bad day, the girl whose house was always the place to hang out. Laughter echoing off the walls, too many voices speaking all at once, someone over every weekend like clockwork. She exists now as a ghost that haunts me in the twilight hours of the night as I stare out my window and try to sleep. A ghost that makes the photographs I still keep all around my room flutter so they draw my attention and I once again stare at the faces of people that used to love me, barely even recognizing that I’m in the picture too. When I sit in that rocking chair, I’ll see a version of me - still young and naive - out playing in the woods like many years ago. 

The people in those pictures are still my friends, even if I am not theirs and we do not talk. They are still my friends. I think that when I live in that cabin in the woods, they will still be my friends, and the ghosts of who they were will play in the woods with the ghost of me.