Spike Jonze has got nothing on us.

I am watching surrealist romance movies and thinking that almost every lovestruck person in the world tries to make their story big. They want it splashed on a silver screen in indie music and vintage, oversaturated/strategically faded colorings and they want it to touch people's hearts the ways theirs have been touched. They want to fill them like ink in water, swirling, sloshing, touching the edges, leaving stains in hues that mix as they move. They want these feelings, deep like the drop-off in a lake you weren't expecting, to make your emotions shift places in order to make room.

But love doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to wait for a hundred years for a spell to break. It doesn't have to be crossed fate-lines and tragedy.

This is how I love you at 2:53 in the morning on a Sunday-Monday night:

I am thinking of your smile, and the way it makes me see joyful tears etching riverbeds into human faces. I am thinking of doing dishes in your House's kitchen, and how much I hate doing dishes, but how I never thought twice about it when I did it two-dozen times the last time I was close enough to see your eyes. I'm missing your snore--uneven, resonant, reassuring, telling me in my insomnia that you are there and alive.

Once upon a time I drove to nowhere with a man who told me I had pieces of him in my heart. We thought that maybe we had been in love in a past life, always destined to come back to each other. To a seventeen year old girl about to leave the only town she really ever knew, it felt like the truth. What I didn't think about then was that past lives are not this life. What I didn't think about then was that "destined to find" did not mean "destined to stay."

Your kisses never tasted like jade-and-lilac destiny. They never whispered tangled promises torn from the pages of tortured coming-of-age tales. You have never once felt like a fairytale, a myth, or something too good to be true. The first time I kissed that man, on a ratty basement sofa, I knew it was going to happen. But the first time I kissed you, I was tied to a fence post in the middle of the night, and when I leaned forward, at first you darted away. When you finally kissed me, there were no cosmic fireworks. The planets did not realign. My mind did not freeze time. We moved on, in the dark, in that strange place with all its strange circumstances. It was, as kisses go, utterly unremarkable.

Except for the fact that it was you and I, and that I remember it.

Once upon a time I told a girl I was in love with her. She told me, "You don't know what it means to be in love. You can't be in love unless the other person loves you back." And she didn't know it, but with those words she changed my heart, and my head. Years later, when that boy on the ratty old couch stopped loving me and started using me, I said, "I'm in love with you," but in the back of my head a voice chanted can't-be-can't-be-can't-be. To this day, I am convinced I will never be in love. There is no cynicism tying this to my heart with rough ropes and I am not the cracked stone of a jilted twenty-something. I am only certain that, however much I love someone, they cannot love me back.

But the other day I drew an apartment with a dreamcatcher in the window and sex toys on the bookshelf. I sketched your posters onto the walls under my banners and left my journal on the graphite bed that I thought, if I could just sit on it, just for a second, would smell like you. I thought I heard cars on the street that existed somewhere behind and below the copy paper. I thought maybe, for a second, I could hear a key--your key--in the front door.

In my room that is not an apartment drawn on paper, where you are not going to come through the door and the sheets don't smell like you, I say to myself, "I think maybe I'm in love with you." My mind shuffles memories like cards. There's a wooden floor lit by flickering flashlights and an apartment filled with books looking out onto Central Park and a basement full of cheering people and your hand in mine. There are tears and there is laughter and there's a dozen stupid inside jokes that can still make us double over, gasping for breath. You are hugging me goodbye on a New York street corner, a gravel parking lot, a dormitory lounge, a public library. I say again to myself, "I am in love with you." This time there are no can't-be's.

Instead, I am thinking of your smile.