Over hazy IPAs that tasted like too much experimentation, I told him about the first and second men I ever loved. “The first broke my world open,” I said, gulping down my beer. “The second pieced it back together.” I was working on a theory of love stories: studying their lineage in mythology and folklore, and trying my best to piece together some grand unifying theory of their designs. “What I’ve gathered so far,” I told him “Is that each one isn’t unique. They blend into each other; our love for one person impacting our love for the other.”

It was early September, and already Texas was bracing for the first pass of false-fall. The temperature was dropping, and the night was slow-crawling from purple-pink to muddled black. Above us, the bar’s string lights twinkled into existence, like long-lost stars rediscovered by new astronomers.

“I keep thinking about the past and future,” you said. “How the two collide in profound ways, intertwining like parasitic vines across garden bushes.” Two beers in, and he was getting more poetic than usual.

“But, I must confess. I don’t buy your theory of love.”
"No? Why not?”
“I just think,” you took a pause and swallowed the rest of your beer. “Once a relationship ends, it ends. Those people who linger on the feelings are just never getting over it. Never moving on.”

I considered his proposition. Often, when I lingered too long on the feelings of my past relationships, I felt like I was drowning in a dense, thick mud. It was hard to reckon with it. I understood their importance, but perhaps he was right; acknowledgement could be seen as a form of weakness.

“But,” I countered. “Aren’t you friends with all your exes?”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, most of them, besides Louis. What’s your point?”
“Doesn’t that require acknowledgement? Some form of understanding that you were, at one point in time, in love?”
“Sure. I guess.”
“And why not Louis?”
“He’s different.”
“Why’s that?”
“He was the first man I ever really loved,” he replied, swirling the trace drops of beer around in his glass. “And everyone knows you never really get over the first man that you love.”