"I want you to find someone who makes you as happy as my guy makes me, and...he's not it."

So here’s what happened: I sat down in front of my computer. Put on my writing playlist. Boldly titled this, “You Are Not A Half” and was fully prepared to write something feel-good and empowering and completely #girlboss.

Except...I can't write what I don't believe. Not completely, anyway. And right now, I know that I'm not a half, but I don't exactly feel whole, either.

In all realness, I kind of feel like I'm in pieces.

Lately, countless incredible souls in my life have promised me that I am whole, that I deserve better, and that one day, I will be as lucky as them and find someone who doesn't make my brokenness seem so fresh and...pronounced. Someone who doesn't break me any further.

They promise me all of this and more, speaking emphatically and simply about finding this "someone." The right guy. And maybe it is simple if you've already found him, and you're lying beside him in bed in a tangle of sheets and legs and sheets, again, texting reassurances to the girl who has always been so good at getting it wrong.

Or maybe it's simple because when it's right, it truly is.

After all, the proverbial right guy will not keep me waiting by my phone, clinging to the foolish hope that it just might light up with that one message. He will not spur me to play the twisted, age-old game of comparison. He will not have me wishing I were enough. The right guy will come, and he will make all this seem so easy and so simple, and he won’t ever let it hurt this much.

I get that. I get everything that my friends are saying. But here’s what they don't get:

Right now, I don’t want the right guy.

I want the wrong one. The one who makes a thousand paradoxes burst inside my chest whenever I am with him. The one who feels like a vacation and a home, all at once. I want the one who perpetrates the hammering of my heart and the madness in my mind and the wildness of my unbounded hopes. I want the guy, the wrong guy, who makes me believe that he is the right one when I am with him—that he is so the right one—even though all of my friends know it’s not true, and he knows it’s not true, and I know it’s not true (and I almost believe it, I do).

And I've come to realize that this is okay.

It’s okay to want the wrong guy.

Look. Anyone who knows me knows that I am all for healthy relationships in which people build each other up and choose each other, time and time again. And, yes, my addiction to choosing people who don't choose me back is emotional nicotine, but there is also nothing healthy about not letting yourself feel. Especially if you want to.

So even though I'm in pieces, I will pull myself back together, and I will, in time, seek and take what I deserve.

But for right now, I want the hurt. And the only thing I want to "deserve" is to hold onto this for a little longer. Because so long as the pain stays, all of the good parts—the laughter that resonated throughout the room, the laughter that was stifled and shared between just the two of us like a secret, the allure of the risk, the rawness, the moments where I believed that we could really be something—they will be there, too.

"I say give me regret. As long as I can keep the good memories, too."

Give me regret. Give me heartbreak. Give me tears at midnight and Beyoncé songs on full blast and the feeling of my heart sinking to my stomach whenever I remember that I’m not permanent and that I’m fading away and the sigh of relief when I see him after a long day and the realest version of myself that I’ve felt in months.

Give me all of it. Because it’s okay. I can take it.

I want to.