I measured my time in milestones. Our first date was a week before he officially became my boyfriend, and Valentine’s day was a month and a half after. The entire year was cut into slices of months, of weeks, of days. This weekend would bring our next visit to the movies, and the week after would likely entail a very necessary journey to Petco. He was always fond of sea life and the like. We once entered with intentions of browsing, but left with two baby fiddler crabs named after ourselves. I knew nothing of animals or ecosystems – I was always more of the programming and electricity sort – but I listened patiently to his never-ending rambles of cherry shrimp and Japanese algae eaters.

He works on his research projects nowadays, mainly focusing on erecting gardens or community compost bins. I would know, I dealt him my harshest hand of criticism when reviewing his website. What do I work on nowadays? I have computer science and robotics coursework to be done, but it all seems juvenile to me. I tend to spend my time ducked in the corner of the classroom, writing in journals and constructing the framework for my college application essays. We all find out where we will spend the next years of our lives in half a year’s time, when admission notices and rejection letters are delivered to our mailboxes. My entire life has been building up to that moment. I can only sit and vibrate with excitement as I wait for time to carry those long-awaited days toward me, as a brown leaf would sink with the wind on a particularly breezy fall evening. Poetically.

I wonder how I managed to make it through the winter last year. I looked forward to the next time that we would traverse the large, almost too-bright clothing stores of our local mall. I woke up every morning knowing that I would fall back asleep that night with new memories with him and new pictures to admire with glazed eyes dripping with sugar-sweet nostalgia. Those pictures are tucked beneath my bed frame, not to hide them away, but because I have no means to display them. I used to have a small contraption of string and clothespins that I hung photo strips and movie tickets from, but that has long since broken. I suppose that it was my fault for connecting it to my wall in such a crude manner – with easy-remove wall strips and tape – but I don’t really believe that. I think that time bore its weight on the heavy posts of the contraption and it had no choice but to sag with age and with contempt.

I believe our short-lived relations deteriorated in the same way. It was my fault for naively pursuing something more when I had so crudely forged an image of myself that did not reflect who I was to become. I was an amateur sculptor with watery clay and no chisel. I forced together lumps of wet ceramic to engineer a creature that looked and sounded and smelled as stable as the famous billionaires on the cover of Time magazine. I deceived him as I had deceived myself. When he moved to touch my makeshift figurine it fell into indistinguishable mounds of equal parts monster and human. He blamed his unsteady hands more than I blamed my poor craftsmanship, and so we had unknowingly come to the consensus that the fault was his.

I can no longer wake up every morning knowing that I will fall asleep with new memories to cherish and new photographs to adore, but in a way this is what I had been hoping for. I wanted time to build myself out of marble and gold and whatever it is that rich sculptors use for their even-richer clients. I taught him to think the same. He throws around words like “compatible” and “love” to convince me that I need his support just as much as he needs mine. I don’t consider myself particularly well-read, but I know this tale forward and back, and it always ends when the stupid teenager takes back the conniving boyfriend who wants intimacy more than stability. I sometimes let my books fall through my slackened hands and willingly evaporate into a space meant for daydreams and late-night pondering. But lately, I’ve been using it to wonder: maybe I myself am the conniving teenager. He is just as, if not more, naive than I am. Perhaps I am the villain in this story. Perhaps this isn’t the tale where the ex-lovers fall back into place. Perhaps this is the kind of tale in which the know-it-all student manipulates their classmate into believing and hanging off of every word they say.

I have yet to find another method to use to measure my time. I can pretend that each day is a new page and each month a chapter, but I will never feel that same excitement that I felt those months ago. This short side-story in the library of my life is one of the few without a spine. There is no plot or setting or definitive ends and beginnings; there are only seven chapters of intertwined fingers and boisterous laughter. My new task, my new project, my new fixation, is to fill a new shelf on my own.