Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” Olive said when I mentioned it at lunch. “My brother just told me about this. You don’t notice something and then you learn the name for it and suddenly it’s everywhere.”

Where we reunited and broke our own hearts. And walked away in two pieces.

Falling out of love with someone you still like feels exactly like lying in a warm bed and hearing the alarm clock. No matter how good you feel right now, you know it’s time to go.

You know how every once in a while you look back on your life and you wonder how so much time has passed? You wonder how each moment bled into the next and created the days, months, and years that now all feel like seconds? That’s how I feel. Right now. In this moment. It feels like our entire past together spans eons and the time I’ve spent

There is other love out there for me. But it’s different. It isn’t this. It isn’t this exact love. It’s better and it’s worse. But I guess that’s sort of the point of love between two people—you can’t re-create it. Every time you love, everyone you love, the love is different. You’re different in it.

We are over because we aren’t right for each other anymore.

“I don’t think I can be with you,” I say. “I don’t think . . . I don’t think we’re right for each other. Anymore.”

I think you forsake the people you loved before, just a little bit, when you fall in love again. But it doesn’t erase anything. It doesn’t change what you had. You don’t even leave it so far behind that you can’t instantly remember, that you can’t pick it up like a book you read a long time ago and remember how it felt then.

get it now. I get what you were saying. About how falling in love with Sam didn’t mean that you forgot me. That it doesn’t change how you once felt. It doesn’t make the people you loved before any less important.