On what's next in On loves.

There are things I don’t say.

I don’t talk about how sick I was when we stayed on Tonsai Beach in Thailand. Don’t talk about how I could barely move, I felt so bad. Don’t talk about how I laid on the bed beneath the mosquito net while he packed up all my things that were strewn all over the hut. “I’ll do it in the morning,” I said. “I think you need to sleep as much as you can,” he said as he organized and packed my things.

I don’t talk about how we spend all of our flights snuggled up together. How he puts sunscreen on me in thick layers so I don’t burn. How he sometimes says to me, “Baby, did you know that you’re just a baby?!” How we are both cheap as dirt, even when it comes to deciding where to eat in Thailand. How, a few days after all this happened, we walked around Bangkok at night, past women and their babies begging on the street, and gave them money and he talked about being conflicted about being on vacation in a poor country, about walking past these desperately poor people on our way to get drunk.

I don’t talk about how he always offers to share his mango sticky rice. How he loves dogs more than anyone I know. How sometimes, when we’re sitting next to each other, he leans over and sniffs me. “What?” I’ll ask. “I just like the way you smell,” he says.

I don’t talk about how it was all so good, until I stopped to write out all the good and realized that, sometime between Then and Now, the good kinda got washed away.

“Just came across cheap flights to Bejing/Shangai,” he texts me this morning.

And it occurs to me that he has no idea how breakable we are.

Last updated June 12, 2017