“You know what? I’m yours all day tomorrow if you just talk to me right now.”

With eyes wide, he stammered a life story, or something like it. I wanted to know the best feeling he’d ever felt, what he found funny but didn’t want to laugh at, what it was like to hold a girl’s hand for the first time. He had a penchant for getting hungry every twenty minutes, but he didn’t really realize it until I asked. He’d never tell me his ultimate weakness, but when he was twelve years old, he wanted green eyes.

I go around looking for a connection with people, like it were my mission to know someone so well we become interchangeable. Every day I am learning that, first, you can only ever achieve half of that and, second, it only happens a few times in your life.

I’ve had a lucky share of “few times” already. And it worries me that I’ve run out of chances to find them. That maybe the only people who can meaningfully fill up my future are ones I’ve met and marched past before. I can only hope not. I dream too many different types of people in one second to ever accept that they will never become real one day.

The problem with me is I am always searching, searching, searching. I find treasure chests and dirt. I find myself needing both. I am guilty of wanting manic pixie dream people in real life, who will write me like a story and help me go out like a comet. And then when your head starts listing things that could have been better, you know something’s got to change. Big time.

I always fancied becoming an answers kind of girl, but the truth is that I’m full of questions and diagnoses. I don’t have any solutions. The only solution I know is leaving, leaving, leaving—which honestly never solves anything, it simply starts the problem over with someone else.

The problem of sincerity, honesty, and effort. The soaking-your-boots, tickling-your-bones type of certainty, an utter lack of suspicion that lies and laziness could ever be among the things that hurt you. Be it clumsiness, be it judgement, be it even anger at inopportune times. Just don’t ever give me a chance to doubt or second-guess a second time.

If my search history could talk, here’s what it would say today: Apple is sick. Yes, again. Everything hurts and she knows it’s a sign that something isn’t right. Somewhere deeper than her bones. She wants to change her life. She still wants to change the world. She is bored. She is lonely. She worries she might never trust again.