They never did. I was their intoxicant.

“If I could bottle it up, I would. But then that’d defeat the purpose of that personality quirk that makes you write half-sensical phrases in notebooks, on your updates, on your blog – twirling your feelings around like a clumsy drum major.

“But if I bottle it all up, mix it all together, just a bland beverage with no distinguishing bitterness, a weak tea. I want Moxie. I want something I have to sip, sip and wonder, and always want for more.”

I remained silent as he compared my insanity to fizzy water, looked down at my skirt, thought of a thousand secret things to write. I smiled.

“They think I like the crazy ones.”

I asked him, mirroring his smirk, “Don’t you?”

“I don’t want you to go.”

They never did. I was their intoxicant. I never wanted to go, either. I liked the way my unhinged brain entangled him, more than my body – which has its own charms, of course – ever could. I liked the way it felt to be held in his arms. I liked saying I love you to him and then the next yelling at him. And he’d always say he loved me. He was my drug.

But I am my half-sensical phrases. The unfiltered miasma of me. And I always invent that bottle’s damning approach. And then it’s time to go.

I held his hand in the middle of a street.

“I won’t.”