Florian’s Reviews > Lie With Me > Status Update

He shakes my hand and leaves without another word. All the same, the gesture lasts a little longer than the custom demands. There is no ambiguity, just an extra moment of pressure, somehow in keeping with the extraordinary singularity of what has occurred between us.

The series of relevations causes a sound to reverberate in my ears, the kind of distorted humming noise that an amplifier makes when it's shorting out.

He looks at me for a long time afterward. I don't understand his insistence. I say: What? What's the matter?
He says. What's your number? I'm asking because you're not the type to call.

He says: You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that.

I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It's a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. [...] The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love.

This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.

He taps his cigarette to make the ashes fall, but he hasn't smoked it enough. It's a gesture intended to convey composure, but it only makes him appear more vulnerable.

This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable.