If anyone had told me it would all end as quickly as it began, I wouldn’t have believed a word. It was a warm thirty degree evening on the cold cobble stone streets of Portsmouth New Hampshire. Clutching my hot chocolate, I looked up at the girl Amanda walking next to me, her light brown hair blowing in the breeze wondering if any of this was real. Just like the other girl, I had left in California long before, we had been dating for two months. Just like the other girl, she was brilliant; a chemist PhD candidate, her world made up of chemicals and formulas I could never pronounce.

Underneath her earth tone scarf, she wore her favorite chemical serotonin around her neck, something I knew she was quickly losing without her having to tell me. As the snow danced around us, we glanced into sparkling shop windows and gazed at the handmade silver jewelry with nervous joy. Just like the girl I associated with the Pacific Ocean, I was convinced she and I were on the same page, that we were headed somewhere beautiful, like the world was tonight… but that’s what I had thought before.

Three years prior to that evening, thirty degrees warmer and 3,000 miles west in San Francisco, I had also never wanted it to end. On the adventure of the day, the worn rickety staircase stared up at Marie and I from its entrapment of vines urging us forward. In that moment I didn’t care where it would take us because I knew together, we could beat anything. We as usual had no idea where we were going… for neither of us had any sense of direction. All I knew was if I followed the assumed beauty in front of me, nothing else mattered. I had spent previous dates asking her novice questions about her field of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences that she studied at Stanford, and charmed her with my artist trench coat aesthetic. We were the perfect combination of opposites ready for disaster. With each ascending step on the worn wood, I gazed up at her beautiful topographical outline I could never sketch, made up of dotted freckles, playful hazel eyes and untamed auburn curls. Like every time, I was convinced her red boots would stay on the ground with mine, never escaping my secure grasp.

After the hot chocolate had been drunk from around cold hands, and the local shops turned off their glowing lights for the night, we got into Amanda’s car, turned up the heat, and blared Taylor Swift’s Red album to discuss our next date because we assumed there would be one. As the streetlights whisked by on the fogged-up windows, she suggested I come over to her apartment for dinner and of course I said yes, never knowing this was the start of the end because it read like the beginning just like in one of our Taylor Swift songs.

Both of these girls in both of these spaces were smart as hell, made up of chemicals and environmental policies of wonder, but youthfully insecure in their inability to voice their sexuality or intentions. They kept me sustained in a blurred-out dream of beauty, adventure and mysteriousness that I coveted as my own. In either time zone, I was sure we were going to end up together. But the fact was, I had a type that I couldn’t shake. Why I was into crazy STEM women who just weren’t that into me? Mom says to not make comparisons about your prior relationships, but what happens when that is the only thing left?

After meandering our way around the city to a park bench by the pier, I looked out at the sun glinting off the ends of her hair and unlike the chemist girl in New Hampshire, I asked the ocean girl out to my house for dinner. But just like the chemist, this was the start of the end, and I would later wonder when I would ever learn from my mistakes.

Dinner at Amanda’s was anything but real, basked in a strategically placed mirage of confidence. Before cooking, deep in our bulky winter sweaters, we sipped tea from our porcelain pride mugs and looked out to her balcony window to the snow settling on the furniture she had forgotten to bring in that day. Seeing her hand on the couch between us, I placed my own there too, wondering if she would take it. Instead, she sighed, and placed it back in her lap, and neither of us said anything about it.

On the sunny summer evening Marie and I had agreed for dinner, I ran around the house in my midnight blue dress like a maniac making sure everything was perfect. Marie was fashionably late, excited to help me cook and meet my Norwegian forest cat Mitchy. Through the meal we had made together and the wine that had exploded in my face, conversation was light with Sting ready to break any awkward silence. At the end of the surreal evening, I leaned in for a kiss, but she backed away clutching the polished wood railing for safety. I blushed as she then told me she didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship and left that night under the glow of the outside light, my blue dress billowing after her in the ocean breeze.

Like the chemist girl, she was urging to bolt from my presence at any second, squirming within a sexuality that I thought to be her own. Like the chemist girl, Marie had no idea what she wanted, and like the chemist girl I never seemed to learn. The Friday night drive back on the icy road from Newmarket to Durham the air was sought with a heavy silence without Taylor Swift to lighten the mood. Watching her hand grip the wheel in the low light I thought back to the Ocean Girl who had left but convinced myself Amanda wouldn’t because she wasn’t her, that she was different.

That weekend, I was on the phone with my friend convincing myself it wasn’t going to end the same like last time when the text came in from Amanda saying it was over. Looking at the text in my hand, my mind flashed to last time, in my midnight blue dress standing at the door, wondering what, if anything could make them stay even just a little longer.