The reason love is so hard, youngblood, is that we don’t fall in love with someone else. We fall for a person with the qualities we want to see in ourselves. Love is a mirror.

Imagine there’s this guy, and he’s lonely, and he wants to find love. It doesn’t have to be a guy, youngblood, it can be a girl, too, or however a person identifies. This is just how it goes. Imagine, for the sake story, that this guy is looking for a girl. It can be a girl looking for a girl, or any combination really, but for now, it’s a guy looking for a girl. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

The guy has been burned before. In past relationships, he learned what it meant to be cruel, what it meant to be heartbroken, what it meant to make mistakes, and what it meant to see the future reflected in a young lover’s eyes. All of that is in the past, and he works a job that leaves him wanting something deeper. At his job, he’s underappreciated. You understand?

Then one day, he meets a girl. She’s younger, but not by much, and possesses has the type of vibrancy that he’s desperately craving. On the train home from work, the girl dances a small dance in as music tickles through headphones. She smiles. She looks happy, but she, too, is wanting, is tired of drifting. She wants stability. She craves partnership after a series of failed romances. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

On the train, the two see each other. It doesn’t have to be a train, it can be anywhere. A park, a store, a gathering. But for this story, it’s on a train home from work. Trains move like life. They barrel forward making quick stops for people to enter and exit.

The guy and girl recognize in the other the things they want for themselves. It’s the magic of attraction. You understand? This person is everything we’re not.

The guy and girl speak. Since the other party reflects us, we’re telling ourselves what we’ve been waiting to hear. That, youngblood, is why the language of love feels like a song. We give ourselves permission to be free.

They kiss, and that first kiss, becomes a benchmark. So, they kiss more. They kiss so much that they forget to breathe. And it’s not that they are secretly kissing themselves, it’s that they’re kissing someone in the way that they’ve always needed to be kissed and that kiss is returned to them, and the pieces fit.

Kissing turns into more intimate affairs, and so the guy and the girl strip away their clothes to become closer, to understand who each other truly are, and in doing so, it gets complicated. By being more honest, they start to see the cracks in their own foundations.

You see, youngblood, we are not always who we think we are, and this is a scary moment of truth. Am I the person I want to be? Or have I been fooling myself, which means I’ve been fooling them, which means am I deceitful? The guy and girl have long conversations and some of the pieces they thought fit together so perfectly suddenly don’t fit together as well. They bottle it down because why tamper with something that, up until then, has been working so well?

But what’s really happening is that they’re seeing themselves reflected back as imperfect and it scares the, it makes them vulnerable. The guy and girl silently promise to get better, to grow and evolve, to change.

And therein lies the rub. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

Over time, an argument erupts, and things get said, and blame gets thrown, and feelings get hurt because this person, this reflection of us, now mirros all of the things about ourselves that we don’t like. They are us, and by arguing and yelling and fighting, we’re actually fighting ourselves. Every mean thing we say is actually aimed at us, every criticism and jab is pointed inward. It’s hard to accept that the person we want to love is imperfect, even though that person is us. Then the guy says I love you, and the girl says, I love you, too.

This guy and girl push through. Neither wants to go back to being alone and so they make adjustments to find common ground. The guy still goes to work, the girl still dances to the music in her headphones. But then the guy, knowing how much he loves the girl, decides to adopt her traits. On the way home, he dances to music in his headphones. The girl gets a job that pays well, but she doesn’t enjoy it. We take on the traits of our partners thinking that to be more like them, we must become them.

But that doesn’t work the way we believe it to. We swap roles and our partner becomes more like us than we are like us. The things we fell in love with no longer exist in them, because we are them, and they are us, and the whole thing is complicated, you understand? No longer is the guy reflected back in the girl, and the girl is no longer reflected back in the guy. They are trying to be the other. After some time, neither knows who they are anymore. The person reflected back is us, but the old us, the us full of flaws, and secretly we fear them.

Tension builds. One night there’s another argument and someone says you’ve changed, but it goes both ways because how can one person stay the same forever? The thing we wanted to see ourselves as no longer exists because we’ve become someone else without knowing we’ve become someone else, and in the process, we don’t like who we’ve become. The traits the other person possessed that we admired so much, are us, and we are no longer us. And how did it get this way?

We get mad at ourselves. It’s complicated, but we have adopted the traits of our partner, which means we have become the person we’ve always wanted to be, and even though it was how we always saw ourselves; it doesn’t feel right. Because there’s power in wanting and magic in not-being. Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

The guy and the girl are so far away from the selves they were that day on the train, and now the train is running express. The guy, in his new skin, wonders if the girl is worth it, but because she has become him, he’s asking this of himself. It’s confusing, you see, but it’s always pointed inward. She is him and he is her and that’s always the way it will be. We are each other, always. And now seeing himself through her eyes, the guy finds boredom and stability when he craves music and dancing. The girl looks at the guy and sees someone more free, now that she is bound to her stable job. You understand?

But they stay together, you see, because they’ve been burned in the past, and they’ve changed together, and going back to the way things were feels foreign and terrifying and the game of a younger blood.

Eventually, they have a child, and that child is an even mix of the guy and the girl. Or they adopt, or they find a child to dote their values upon. The girl has become the guy and the guy has become the girl and the child has become both of them, but what happens is that the child becomes only their best and worst parts.

The child grows and exhibits loneliness while dancing to music, finds joy in the menial, treads the waters between cruelty and empathy. The child seeks magic and watching them seek magic becomes magic for the guy and the girl.

And then one day, the child asks them about love, and how it works, and where to find it, and there are no definitive answers. The girl tells one thing, the guy tells another, and though neither are wrong, they both believe they are right. They say it’s compromise, but without sacrifice. They say

it’s never settling, but also settling down. They say it’s being selfless, even though selflessness is selfishness because to love someone means to love yourself, you understand?

And that’s the way life goes, and how love only ever exists in the small pocket of time when a guy and a girl meet on a train. That’s it. Small pockets when the world feels full of possibilities because the person across from us is everything we want to see in ourselves, and the train barrels forward, and we lose ourselves to an idea until nothing else remains.

Ask me how I know, youngblood, and I’ll tell you a different story.

W. T. Paterson is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire, and is a graduate of Second City Chicago. His work has appeared in over 90 publications worldwide including The Saturday Evening Post, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Dalhousie Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, and Fresh Ink. A semi-finalist in the Aura Estra short story contest, his work has also received notable accolades from Lycan Valley, North 2 South Press, and Lumberloft. He spends most nights yelling for his cat to "Get down from there!" Visit his website at www.wtpaterson.com.