We fell in love at the same time.  We even fell in love with each other at the same time. We just didn’t do it the same way.

I fell in love with her voice and the way she ordered drinks at the bar.  I fell in love with how she did her hair and how she got dressed in the morning.  I loved the way she stood on her tip-toes to kiss me and I loved how she wrote songs in the shower that she later belted out in dingy bars.

She fell in love with my need for silence and my habit of waking up early to write.  She loved that I didn’t drink coffee and rarely drank whisky.  She would sit and watch me on the fire escape and she’d work me quietly into songs so I almost didn’t notice.

The first time we slept together the condom broke.  We bonded over test results, anxiety, and assurance, but we were less careful after that and sometimes we were dumb.

She was noise and I was quiet, and we loved each other in the spaces in between.  We laughed and we fucked and we traded friends and apartments, and we were good at everything.

We kept each other safe, but in the end we couldn’t help remember that things break. 

—Guy New York