This is how you will lose me.
First, you'll make me afraid of losing you. For two months, three months, your calculated displays of affection will overjoy me, will keep me up at night with a smile as I remember the words you spoke, the kisses on my forehead, your hands pressed gently on my throat. In four months time, when you are about to lose me, these will be the memories I remember, the memories that keep me around for far longer than I should have stayed.
When you lose me, I will not have wanted to be lost. You'll lose me because you've schematically pulled back, stunted our communication and, in turn, I threw myself at you, dropping to your every whim, playing into your perfect plan, responding excessively to your uneven smile.
Eventually, this will become tiresome.
I don't love you, but perhaps I thought I someday could. I don't know why -- I don't know what made you different -- but whatever it was made me overlook things that would have been definite deal breakers if they'd been performed by someone, anyone, else.
Maybe the first time you'll see you're about to lose me is when I stop replying to your messages in the same way you've already stopped replying to mine. After that happened, I ran into you -- a complete accident -- but your eyes skimmed over the man I was with in an acute acknowledgment that I too can date other people.
Of course, I wasn't dating this man, but you didn't know that and, later, you verbalized it during our cab ride home. Drunkenly, you told me you hoped you hadn't ruined my plans.
You hadn't, but I stayed silent anyway, looking out the window, watching the Manhattan morning fly by.
"You're a classy girl," you'd told me on our second date, when I'd refused to go home with you. "Don't you ever change how much of a catch you are."
And, I didn't.
So, you'll lose me when I finally wake up, when I realize I am too classy, am too much of a catch, to be sneaking into apartments in the dark, apartments haunted by drugs on the side table and vague remnants of girls who are not me.
On our third date, you again asked me to come home with you, but -- again -- I refused, remembering your line about being classy, about not changing who I fundamentally am.
"Anticipation is half the fun," I teasingly whispered before I kissed you on the street, repeating the phrase you'd told me on our first date when I'd leaned in for another kiss and you did not reciprocate, taunting me dangerously from a bar stool away.
But, that is how you will lose me -- when anticipating you is no longer fun.
You'll lose me when I still want you -- desperately -- but, by the time you realize that, I'll already be gone.