I knew exactly what it felt like to have so close to everything with her when I had been led for so long to believe she was something I could never have anything with.

The summer before our Fifth Year passed by swiftly and unheralded; a summer of sweltering sunshine and walking barefoot in the sand and long, hazy nights, so familiar and yet so new. We drank whiskey straight from the bottle, ears ringing with slurred laughter in her garden beneath a blanket of black and gold. We took midnight strolls through the golf course near her house when after months of coaxing she was finally brave enough to steal out under the cover of darkness. We drove aimlessly in the car her parents bought her for hours the day she got it, smoking out of the window and humming tunelessly to an infinite cassette tape, until Dublin was so far behind us that it was safe enough to pull over and crawl into the backseat.

We went to a diner far away from everyone we knew and flung fries across the table while the waitress hissed in disapproval, and when I got my first job working in Blockbuster’s Connie joined me during the quiet hours in the empty shop, musing about all the movies we could make together. We lay in my bed for hours on those lazy afternoons when it was too warm to move an inch, and sometimes she would glance up at me from a book I lent her, tender eyes brimming with so much affection and my chest felt almost too tight—a reminder that yes, this was real. And there were moments, stolen, secret, moments in the dark, when it would feel like nothing else of relevance existed beyond us. Everything had no meaning outside of what we had, and yet she gave everything I had ever known all semblance of meaning. Being in love with Connie gave life a glamour, an intrinsically easy charm, so that every little thing around me bloomed into something beautiful, worthy of divine creation.

I knew we weren’t dating in the conventional sense. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that forgetting that one fundamental rule would be to destroy everything and lose her in an instant. I was smarter than to try and label whatever it was that we had. She wasn’t really my girlfriend. She could never really be my girlfriend. But it was so easy to forget, sometimes. We would watch a movie together, curled up on my sitting room couch, and her head would come to rest on my shoulder, her fingers entwined in mine. Or I would wake up in the morning before the sun fully rose and her face would be buried in the crook of my neck, our limbs all tangled together, and she would look so beautiful and so at ease that I would force myself to stay awake just to watch her. And sometimes when we laughed together, alone in her room, laughing at everything and nothing at all, I would catch a look in her eyes that was so fond and so soft that I would forget that look meant nothing at all. It was in those simple moments that common sense would slip away and I could allow myself to pretend, even if only for a while, that this was something more than just a stupid teenage fling. What use were labels or definitions or categories when those feelings in my chest and the laughter in her voice were far more real, far more concrete, than they could ever be?