Slumber parties in the middle of your eighth-grade year are full of whispers encapsulating your future. When they truth-or-dare you into confessing your ideal date, you cannot fathom that you may somehow be speaking it into existence.

Every time I would reply with the same hopeless romantic and sappy narrative. “It’s a tie,” I’d said coyly as if my fictional love life is somehow about to be lustier than the other preteen tales. My friends would humor me, though, and lean in, hoping to fall into the love-lore that I painted for them and depicted as truth. I was always good at storytelling, even back then.

“A concert in a small, general admission venue. The lights illuminate his face with dark reds and bright blues. I turn to look at him, but I mean truly notice him. He looks so peaceful as the synthetically generated hues meet his blue-green honey-tinted eyes and his lips fumble with the words of one of his favorite songs. Without realizing it, he turns to look at me, too, a smirk on his lips, a chorus churning through his heart, and music filling the space between us. Silence from me as the song they are playing happens to be my least favorite. But once the last chord drops, my heart does as well and I realize that he turned the song I loathe into one that will never stop playing in my mind as I hope it will fill my heart the same way.

“Or, perhaps, a subway ride to a destination unknown. My dream empire city is ours to explore and mine to turn to poetry. We’re lost; I’m lost. Brooklyn seems to have twisted into a different world, but the Manhattan skyline shields me from the early sunset, which illuminates his eyes. Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass becomes our unknown destination as we spend hours weaving through unfamiliar streets and dissolving into the millions, billions of New York passersby. The pebble beach beneath our feet seems to offer little stability because suddenly my knees are quite shaky. His silhouette against the East River turns to me and asks if I’m in love without literally saying a word. We make our way over the Brooklyn Bridge and trek home, lost in conversation every step of the way.”

And maybe my middle-school-self did not have the exact adages or ability to blend together this type of description, but she did have a way of telling these biographical stories to her friends before they were to have even become true. So, when I found myself on our last date, overlooking the East River, I knew that I could never find this type of fulfillment and joy in anyone again. For the sun had set long ago and the moon confessed to the surface of the river that tonight the world was at peace.

We sat on a bench in Manhattan, peering out at DUMBO, Brooklyn, where we could just make out the infamous pebble beach that delicately surrounded Jane’s Carousel. And just beyond that, I swear I could see the tiny theater that had not too long ago housed some pop-punk band that no one knows. Except you know it and, and I know it, too: and I wonder if that is enough.

And if it is not, I implore you to please tell my twelve-year-old self because I’m sure that her hopeless romantic heart will remind you of the beauty of what we have held between us. She will find a way to make you believe.