"I'm just a work of fiction," she said.

This is a story about love, but it is not a love story. This is a story about a girl who loved, who grew up, and who learned.

This is not what I intended. I always swore to you I'd never fall apart. You always thought that I was stronger; I may have failed, but I have loved you from the start.

It's the easiest thing in the world to flirt with a boy and make him love you. You smile, you laugh, you're serious when he least expects it; he thinks you're "down to earth" and intelligent and sincere. The trick is getting him to think that he's the one who is chasing you, that he's missing something when he isn't with you - and that's a technique you can't be taught. Sometimes I think there's something wrong with me, some explanation for why I'm so manipulative, until I realize that I care too much about people to be a sociopath.

The warmth in your eyes swept me into your arms. Was it love or fear of the cold that led us through the night?

I get bored quickly. Once I get something, or someone, I get distracted. I guess I'm only just starting to acknowledge that maybe, that's the cause of all of my failed relationships - my lack of effort, my lack of follow-through. Maybe I've realized it all along, but I've just never cared - until now. He was different. He was something worth holding on to. I thought that I'd changed, but I'd been drifting away, bored and tethered. One day, he told me he needed space, but that it didn't need to be the end. He was in tears, and so was I. We hugged for a long time.

And when you're needing your space to do some navigating, I'll be here patiently waiting to see what you find.

I left for the coast, alone, and I prayed for the first time in years. As I lay in bed, I thought about what I wanted and all of the things I would change, all of the things I would do better. He made me want to be better, and I only wished that I'd realized it sooner.

And my head told my heart, "let love grow," but my heart told my head, "this time, no, this time, no."

We spent the day together when I returned and he told me that he missed me, that he loved me, to please take him back. Saying "yes," immediately went against everything that I'd stood for, the carefully calculated nonchalance, the manipulation, and yet I said it, looking into the impossibly blue sky as we hugged, thanking God. At the end of that day, he told me that things felt... different. And I cursed myself for being too quick, for letting him know how desperate I was. I knew, then more than ever, that it was my fault - that I could've done something differently, before all this, that I should've realized how much I loved him, how much I didn't want to ever lose him, how much I should've been fighting to keep him. I had three days before I was to leave, and each of those days we talked for hours, crying, wondering whether we could fix things, and how.

The hardest part of living is just taking breaths to stay, because I know I'm good for something, I just haven't found it yet.

The distance won, and we decided to part. He said it didn't feel like the right thing to do, that if it were the right thing, he surely wouldn't be crying so much, but that it was what we needed to do right now. That if we wanted to try to make it work, we had to really want it going in, that we couldn't fix things without being in the same place, that we had no regrets now and that it was better to end it here than to drag it out across those miles and end it in bitterness, later.

There hasn't been a day since that I haven't wondered whether we could be together again, someday, or whether we had missed our chance. I feel that we parted for all the wrong reasons - because we didn't know what else to do, because we weren't in the same place. Circumstances, not issues. I had never felt so shattered before. I'd always been able to move on to occupy my thoughts and emotions with someone else, but this, this was different. I knew that if he wanted to be with me again, I would never look at anyone else.

I was born in the arms of imaginary friends, free to roam, made a home out of everywhere I've been.

It got easier and easier to pretend that I didn't care. We talked frequently. One day he said that he wasn't miserable, but that something didn't feel right, and that he felt it was missing me. He said he wasn't sure what he wanted to do, that he wasn't even sure what those feelings of "missing" entailed. But he had faith that things would work out, and that we didn't need to be anything than ourselves.

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This story is a work of fiction by Molly. Song lyrics are from Fall for You by Secondhand Serenade.