“I don’t know why you’re so hung up on these other girls, Lizzie, I literally think I love you.”

It was the type of half-certain, half-whispered statement that only a twenty-one-year-old boy could toss across a dark room and expect it would be received well. I was staring at the wall in front of me, or at least steeling my eyes in that direction, considering my surroundings were cloaked entirely in black. My sweatpants felt too hot and my baggy T-shirt unnecessary - the outfit I had angrily changed into, bathroom door closed, just moments before climbing between sheets that almost always saw my skin bare. But not tonight. It occurred to me that the boy lying there – older than me, but definitively not yet a man – had only stumbled into my life a handful of weeks before. Yet that is how college operates, permitting bodies that collide by chance to mingle in shared spaces for days, weeks, months on end. Migrating from lecture hall to library perch to brunch spot to sweaty bar to here, wrapped in my baby blue blanket, at 3 am.

The first night I met Leon, he didn’t try to kiss me. He got my number from a mutual friend and asked me to lunch the next day. I remember the meal lasted a long time, maybe too long, and it felt almost like an interview. Before we parted ways, he invited me to be his date at a party that upcoming Saturday and I agreed for lack of an overwhelming reason not to, wondering if this occasion would be just as occupied by questions about our respective class schedules.

An hour before the party, I wrapped my hair around a curling wand just to occupy my fingers. My eyes constantly skittered to my phone screen, despite the fact it remained unlit. Even though I had been the one to initiate the breakup, I felt empty without the constant check-ins from my long-distance boyfriend. I encircled my eyes with ebony eyeliner as I tried not to wonder what he was doing. Was he at Jongro with Gary, ordering way more steak than could be considered healthy for someone with a cholesterol problem? Watching The Officein his room and trying to evade the company of his clingy roommates? Maybe he was at the gym, in those stupid red-striped pants he always wore that were most certainly not meant for athletic activity. I had deleted his number almost immediately following the breakup to remove the temptation of checking in. I studied the gradient of my eyeshadow as I attempted to muster up as much enthusiasm for the night ahead as I could, violently shoving all thoughts of Matthieu from my mind as I laced up my heels.

When I arrived, Leon was sweating. Because the house was hot or he was nervous, I wasn’t sure, but his forehead was glistening when he came outside to get me. I had to wedge myself in between the small space afforded by the door and the beer pong table set up four inches in front of it. We decided to offer ourselves up as opponents to another couple, probably to soften the awkwardness hanging quite blatantly between us, and although I usually get teased for my pinball-pushing way of unsuccessfully shooting, I managed to land the first cup. And the next one. The evening unfolded in a winning streak that did not cease until we were both sufficiently drunk (mostly due to the handle of vodka resting within elbow’s length) and (thankfully) bonded.

We separated from the sticky table and its instruments of our momentary frat-fame to chat in a corner vaguely removed from the crowd. He didn’t immediately dive in for the kiss as most guys would, but asked me for permission before leaning in, which I granted him.

We wound up at an after-party at a different house, where he happened to live, but only stayed downstairs for a few minutes. Instead we went up to lie on his mattress, which rested on the floor, and listened to records for a few hours, as he let me play obscure indie artists that Matthieu had never tolerated. We fell asleep fully clothed watching Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. He never touched me, aside from periodically tangling his fingers in my hair. When I woke up, he had made eggs, or rather, “scrambled omelet,” as he called it. He was horrible at cooking, but, as I would learn in the coming months, he never hesitated to try.

He asked me to be his girlfriend precisely two months before he graduated. We entered into the silent contract that we, like so many others, would only date until the end of the semester. Afterwards he would go to work in San Francisco, and I would still have a year left of school.

When he mentioned the words “I love you,” so eloquently wrapped in that frustrated 3 am plea, I didn’t quite know how to respond. He had made the statement as an apology for talking too openly about his sex life and dating history at a party with his international friends, in a language I only half understood. I didn’t know whether I was angrier that I couldn’t fully grasp what he was saying, or that he had brought up his history with other girls on campus, or that he had used this half-assed love-confession as a scapegoat, or, finally, that he thought that mentioning that word was appropriate at all.

If I had learned anything from my first three years of college, after flitting from New York to Los Angeles to London to Durham, it was that to seek absolute security in the arms of a single other was a fool’s pursuit. Connections were as tenuous as the circumstances that occasioned them. Within a culture of highly driven, fledging adults, it is very rare to cross paths with someone willing to compromise their dreams, which might scatter them to any remote corner of the universe, for a long-term partner, or to hold out in celibacy for the remote promise of an eventual “someday.” In the interim, we are told to live selfishly, love recklessly and slow down for no one. Yet, as I felt Leon’s thumb tracing shapes across my shoulder, I couldn’t help but wonder whether we were all fracturing ourselves in the process, giving smaller and smaller pieces away to figures that were only passing before retreating into the anonymity that they came from.

Ejecting Matthieu from my life had created an emotional cavity that screamed to be filled. Leon was an easy solution. Arriving at my door step with carefully wrapped brownies in hand or texting me that there was a spot saved in the library for me. The months we spent together washed over me in a blur of warmth and security. He was constant, he was stable, he was kind. Yet when I considered the months ahead, in which he would find himself on the opposite coast, I was not so struck by fear as I had been when I left Matthieu. I did not know if I had grown desensitized to the impact of relationships and the emptiness they may leave behind, and had treaded more cautiously with Leon than I had Matthieu, or if what was between Leon and I was never love at all, only comfort.

As I pondered whether a part of me did love Leon, and in what way, and for how long it would last, I remembered the first time Matthieu had uttered the same sentiment. Backs pressed against the asphalt, as the orchestra of taxi cabs and slurring twenty-somethings stumbling across Avenue D drifted up to the rooftop. We had stared up into a sky empty of stars and I remembered wondering if I had heard him right. As I now traced my gaze along the vague shapes of shadow-sheltered furniture lurking before me, I wondered how many times following this moment I would say those three words to someone new.