The day the man who said he wanted to marry me left, I was handed back a pair of running shoes. He had bought those shoes 2,053 miles and one doomed relationship away from the Brooklyn sidewalk we found ourselves on saying goodbye. It was sticky, late June. We were saying goodbye because he had to move away from the city he moved to for me to get a PhD. We were saying goodbye early, three months before he was set to start, because the man who I said I would marry back wanted to be prepared for his great academic future with heartbreak already (only somewhat, I hoped) behind him. We loaded up his parent's SUV, he told me he loved me, and I never heard him say it again. The belief that you can schedule a broken heart, get the damage in early, is a fatal symptom of good judgment. I am no longer persuaded by it.

For mortal instruction on the matter of bad judgement, I look to Norman Jewison's Moonstruck. Nic Cage plays Ronny, a one-handed-by-bakery-accident, cup-overfloweth-with-feeling young man who has fallen in love with Loretta (Cher!), his older brother's bride, over the course of a single evening. Ronny is tormented, certain, often sleeveless. Loretta is measured, practical, recently engaged to the wrong man.

Ronny pleads with her after a night they spend together at the opera, "playing it safe is just about the most dangerous thing a woman like you could do." A well-guarded heart is its own gamble. You can hedge your bets on preservation being worth more than experience, that something left untried is better than standing in the wake of something you once had. Loretta tries this. She defends herself, "I can say yes to some things, I can say no to other things that are gonna ruin everything." I have been on Ronny's side of it, bursting with something I couldn't have talked myself out of. I have been down on my marrow bones too, on a sidewalk in Brooklyn or otherwise.

There was the sidewalk in Crown Heights where a stranger on their way to work comforted me as I walked back home, sobbing into a pair of trail runners (I eventually had to leave Brooklyn too, every corner kept his name). And there was my truck, on some tree-lined backroad, where I first told the man who had given me those shoes that I loved him. I had to tell him because I would have died otherwise, and because I couldn't find another word that better described how it felt to have him look at me from the other side of a room. I was anxious to confess this to him even though I knew that he would say it back to me truly, and even though I knew that he had only ever been the one to break up and I had only ever been the one to be broken up with.

So what is the point of a life organized around the avoidance of ruin? Unlike Ronny, I still have both of my hands. But I know what it feels like to lose your arms and your legs, and I have never once tried to keep them. The alternative is a life spent a short distance from itself.

Needing life's little delights (i.e. Ritz crackers or smoking inside) to be safely enjoyed is like asking the sun to save its energy. You can't ask the sun to stop, or anything else that is burning and willing to spend itself silly. When I was left crying after my (exactly in that moment) ex pulled away in his parent's car, I hadn't decided if I was going to kill myself or not when I got back to my apartment. But somewhere on Union Street I burst into laughter.

My ex had a rational approach to desire. He deemed himself too great a man to be brought down by my vagina. He willingly and without apparent remorse forced an unnatural, unnecessary, and irreparable ending with the one person in the world who made him believe in destiny and godlessness and New York City to prove himself this great man, one with a doctorate in tropical botany.

He could not (would not!) be sidetracked by my wiles and wonder and unconditional devotion. While I, his violent opposite, would give up even nicotine for the kind of love that no set of words would ever come close to doing justice or would feel quite right when trying to describe it. I laughed because out of all the things I felt for him in that moment, what I adored most was his foolishness. I loved him and only someone so completely fucking stupid would pencil-in a cosmos-defying breakup to make sure true love doesn't get in the way of homework.

And where I loved, he hated. My absurdity, first cherished, was now evidence he was right to go, as if having conviction and joy in excess was a malfunction of human nature and not its primary activity. I couldn't understand why he left something I'll spend my whole life trying to find again, just to avoid being possibly inconvenienced by it. So I went looking for a theory. Moonstruck has one: men fear death. The movie gets there by way of Rose, Loretta's mother, dealing with her husband's affair. She asks a stranger at a restaurant why men chase women. He tells her it's because they're afraid to die.

My best guess is that my ex is afraid of dying too, and probably his father. His new partner will be surprised by this slow-arriving reckoning in about a year and a half's time, just like I was. Where men love as a bulwark, only able to exist behind a moat, women love toward something. Presented with the same water and walls, we'd probably strip down to our underwear and go for a swim. But what do women fear?

I know they revere the moon, and cheetah print steering wheel covers and being dazzling in front of particular witnesses. I know they like doors that lock and having a cycle all their friends sync up to. Women do have the capacity to fear death, I too am filled to the brim with it on airplanes right up until the Xanax hits. But by having been reminded by everyone from a very early age that a girl's demise is likely to be chosen for them and not by them, women are freed from the responsibility of self-destruction. We don't have to spend our worry on dying. We get to spend it on living instead.

What women fear isn't death, but being spiritually bereft. For two years I waited on a man (sorry), or anything (waking up at 7am, swimming out past the waves, the wind doing something to the trees) to make me feel something again. There are entire philosophies, beards grown and then carved into immortal stone, built around minimizing pain and maximizing control, none of which work for a woman whose actual fear is feeling nothing at all. I don't even like having my picture taken, so what I've enshrined myself with instead is the belief that if I get through something thorny with my spirit still intact, that I'll be rewarded like a dog on its last day. This time, fate's idea of consolation was a man on a bench.

The man on the bench hasn't seen Moonstruck yet, and he doesn't know this essay is being written for him either. In all my years of wanting people from afar, I couldn't have even imagined anyone that looked quite like him. He's pleasant to look at, you should see him rob a liquor store, etc. But what's hard to explain is that when I saw him walk into the restaurant I work at, I knew absolutely nothing about him and couldn't breathe right about it anyway. He fell out of the sky like the kind of luck that will surely cost me something.

A few months later we met properly. We shared cigarettes on a porch and we lit them with a candlestick. We talked about hopes, dreams, virginities, parents, eventually pulling on a strange string holding us together. He had gone to high school with the man I thought I was going to marry, thousands of miles away from where I went to high school, or met either of them in two different cities also thousands of miles apart. He already knew who my ex was, years before I ever put the two of them in the same sentence.

I ended the evening by telling him that I had a crush on him, and that if he ever wanted to kiss me he should let me know. We shook hands, he said "partner," and off we went like cowboys splitting up at a fork towards equally empty roads.

A few weeks after, I found him again on the bench, the cherry lime popsicle I was enjoying dripping well past my elbows. My shirt was off and my butt sincerely outlined, a Saturday morning ritual of public, post-yoga humiliation that I've started calling exposure therapy. I was shaking when I walked up to him, and I made sure to tell him that I didn't know why. We talked for two and a half hours, almost all of it about sex. What made it good, who it was good with, and at some point, whether a Jewish baby can still be Jewish if it isn't circumcised (Rabbi wanted).

He told me he was looking forward to a drama-free summer. I told him that because my crush was unavailable, that I'd probably have one too. It had been three weeks since I'd had sex with anyone, or longer, depending on which way you count it coming in. And just like every time I go any day without having sex, I was certain that I would never have it again. He called it a drought. Then he asked if I found it weird, having feelings for him and for my ex knowing what I did now. But I guess it's not the same feeling. My ex's name is carved into my bones. And on that bench, my crush was still wet with paint (my hope: that I at least cross his mind). I joked, maybe I just had a very specific type: men who went to that high school.

But this does feel wet enough to ruin with a single touch (or essay). I'm still carrying around the two years I spent looking for somewhere to scream and never finding it. But when I see him, I feel something familiar scratch at me too. I talk to him about all of this openly, though in writing it down now I feel the urge to keep it secret from all of you (I won't). We have some kind of strange and unearned conversational intimacy, the kind that usually takes years to craft, not weeks. His theory about it is that we're like two people who slept together years ago but kept the rapport intact after the sex burned off. My theory is that it's like we've peed in front of each other enough times.

With other people, I've felt like I had to prove just how good I am to keep them around. The better I was, the worse their reason for leaving had to be. I thought that would keep me safe. This belief goes against all my others, the ones that believe in necessary hedonism, in choosing to speak instead of choosing to die. I set my feet in two different camps, too twisted and far apart to have found a steady ground on either side.

But with him it's different. The man on the bench and I are not in love and who's to say we will ever be (actually, he's to say). So all we have between us is friendship, and permission. Somewhere in the sticky in-between, the stretched-out-legged no man's land of a democratically owned park bench, we've come to the conclusion that wanting is not a moral failure. Bad is never really that bad when it's shared between two soft hearts. Ronny never tells Loretta to be bad. He tells her that "love isn't here to make things nice — it ruins everything, it breaks your heart, it makes a mess."

Being bad (in love, or lust, or in whatever little else life is about) is just a phrase we learned to use when we couldn't understand what cost us our goodness in someone else's eyes. I think because neither of us is invested in the other's goodness, there's no perfect version of myself I need to keep intact for his sake. The smaller, hushed version that goes to bed pretty and doesn't want too much and never out loud. The relief I have found in his good company does not come from the absence of a mess, but instead, the absence of a judgemental audience for it.

The only anniversaries I've ever had are ones marked by absences, it has been two years to the day since my breakup. I've never lasted a year with anyone, but I've made it two without one. I have spent nearly the entirety of this time trying to become the sort of Good Person my ex would come back for. I finally have a body I willed into submission, and into both front and middle splits. I am nearly done with one of my too many degrees I will hardly need when I eventually become a white-water rafting guide. My hair is longer, curlier, and every time I have had sex with someone I wished was him, I have at least gotten better at it. I fell off the sidewalk and clawed my way into a life that looks almost too beautiful to touch because I live in a house with a garden so overproducing I have to host weekly dinners just to keep up with my crop.

But life is rarely so cooperative, and after all that effort I am here to report that becoming wonderful will not make you wanted. What I have learned instead during my lost years is that there is nothing better you can do for yourself than to risk being foolish. Not the kind of foolish that gets in your own way, but the kind that gets you out of it.

On the ever-cursed day of June 30th, the man I loved left because he wanted to put me behind him before the important part of his life began. Two years later, I am not writing for him, the man who I adored blissfully and on my knees, but instead for a man who may never kiss me. My ex is years from finishing his PhD in a city he complains about living in, dating someone who will never be fatuous in his presence, and never be forgiven for it.

His approach is likely safer. I am not going to bend myself out of shape to say that it's wiser. Wise men have always said "you reap what you sow" as a cautionary tale to women so full of wild oats that you could pour milk on them. Out here in the field of opportunity, I know what I've been sowing is often careless and sometimes unserious, but all wise men are dead and recklessness tastes better with a spoon.

One day I will also die and I have decided that I'll hate that very much, so I'm learning from a splendid, ridiculous, and perfectly cast movie about how I should allow every crush, every humiliation, every impossible hope for something I've always wanted but never had, to leave its mark on me, to let my old bones creak. Fruits rot on the branch, cicadas scream until they fall into skeletal heaps, the moon empties itself out. Every living thing I can see is willing to exhaust itself for the privilege of existing. Once in a while, something reaches all the way down to where you are and hands you something that has always been sacredly yours. Why waste it?

When Ronny tells Loretta he's in love with her, she slaps him twice, failing to return him to reason (and probably turning him on). The happy tragedy of Loretta in Moonstruck is that despite all her good sense, she was still wearing a glorious red dress to the opera, so reason never stood a chance. There's not much in a life that will arrive looking like a good idea. Things arrive looking like Ronny Cammareri asking you to burn with him. Loretta eventually marries Ronny because she "loves him awful," and because she finally understood that being reasonable is not the same as being right.

So what I'm trying to say is that I really think you should kiss me. But why should you kiss me, or kiss anyone, or do anything at all? Not because it is sure to end well, but simply because you can. The argument I'm making here will almost certainly be worked against me someday, but I don't mind that it will be. I will undoubtedly find myself once again in no man's land, the only place in which I will ever be a hero, or at least a mayor. I only ask whoever uses it against me to run quickly and towards somewhere they promise is worthwhile.

I told my therapist that I didn't want to give a man (not even Norman Jewison) credit for reminding me of my once-loud spirit, because men are idiotic and often when they are given an inch, they'll take a mile. But I'd like to tell my crush (and no longer lie to my outstanding therapist) that no amount of movies watched, rides from the airport, dinners made, popsicles shared, or cigarettes lit will ever be able to repay him for this accidental divine intervention. I feel like myself again. I am no closer to knowing how to let go, or being at peace with the universe, or one with myself, but I am, finally, happy to have gotten stupid in the right direction. I am godless after all, I'd rather thank someone real.

So, thank you. Now run.

About the Author…

Teva Fux doesn't have any toenails on her big toenails. She has flirted with the idea of getting something tattooed on the tops of where her nails used to be, but she hasn't taken the leap yet. she does have the tops of her feet tattooed with true on her left foot and love on her write. when she's not thinking about her feet, Teva likes to write and go swimming ideally in a natural body of water, even when its cold. when she's cold and sitting in the sand out on Tybee island, which is the center of the known universe, she likes to think about everything and everyone that has ever happened to her. This helps her writing. she likes to wear boots, she has no proverbial home, and she likes the sounds of frogs and crickets at night. Teva lives a short distance from her her body, and also in Savannah, Ga.