Part of the reason why I write about my life is because I am scared of not remembering anything about it. I have a terrible memory, no doubt an ironic symptom of childhood bullying that taught me the art of forgetting terrible memories. (Truth: I routinely have problems with recalling things that happened before the age of 12). Unfortunately for me, I never quite unlearned how to forget. Now that I am full-grown and expected to remember things like faces and names, I find myself standing around dumb-founded as all my friends recall events at which everyone but me seems to have been present. I routinely fail to recognize guys with whom I’ve gone on single dates, or even people I went to high school with. It seems I am a spectator to other people’s memories but never the one doing the remembering herself.

And it’s not just memories either. It’s skills like how to use JSTOR (thank you, high school debate) or how to swim (thank you, community pool) that I must relearn because I’ve somehow magically forgotten despite everyone’s insistence that there are some things, like riding a bike, that you remember forever. Well, trust me, if there were ever a person who could forget, it’d be me. In Ibiza, for example, this was precisely my problem. Here I was with miles of unpolluted ocean before me, and I was terrified of wading too far out because I hadn’t swum in years. I was always scared to go into pools as a kid until I braved swimming lessons during early elementary school. Then I promptly forgot and had to learn again, this time during a summer around age 10. I don’t think I’ve really swum again since. Eventually in Ibiza, I gave it a go at a shallow beach but I conceded defeat after several gulpfuls of seawater. This was a performance from someone who used to relish jumping off diving boards several yards above her head.

And so I consider my life history a sort of project. Narcissistic it may be, but most of my writing concerns relationships; and my knowledge of relationships is inseparable from my understanding of myself. It’s too bad my mental timeline starts somewhere at last week. To help myself remember the important things, I sift through blog entries from high school, reread old instant messaging conversations, or simply ask questions to people who were paying attention when life was happening. I am endlessly recording and recalling the details of my existence in hopes that turning my laptop into a life library will offer some permanence to my fleeting memories. Last summer, I even paid a friend $40 to transcribe 200+ text messages. This spring, I requested from Harvard my mental health records from 2006 to 2007. It’d been a tumultuous year, and I thought these logs might come in handy some day, not just for “memoir research” (the reason I cited on my request form) but for … well, me. When I go home for the holidays, I dig up paper diaries of my youth and old notes passed from friends to my middle and high school self. I actually still have plenty, including mean ones that declared me a slut at as young an age as 12 and nice ones from girls who are still some of my closest friends today. I’m the type of person who doesn’t throw things away, despite easily blocking out large chunks of my childhood. I’m pretty sure that none of these habits are common, that I am straddling a fine line between forgetfulness and repression,that I likely appear crazy or self-obsessed or both . (That last one may be a correct assessment, since I am, after all, applying journalistic techniques to research my favorite subject: myself.)

The funny thing about reexamining the past is that I always find something new. I have a hard time remembering, and so the Lena of yesterday never seems familiar. I might as well be going through the personal documents of a stranger. Besides, I’ve changed so much that it’s hard to get a grasp of who I was or wanted to be at any given point in time. It’s a good thing that I do a better job than most of keeping track of feelings and thoughts in the moment or else my account of my life would begin somewhere at 17. Luckily, I’ve maintained multiple blogs for the past five years in which I have a record of everything from my adolescent sexual experiences to college admission anxieties to freshman year disillusionment to first loves and last loves. The girl preserved reads like a fictional character to me. Whoever I was then is always too far removed for me to get a good hold on her now. And it’s sad. It’s tragic that I forget.

It’s tragic because forgetting means throwing out the good along with the bad and though I think leaving behind the latter is a matter of self-preservation, it’s the former that makes life worth living, isn’t it? Besides, there are lessons I could learn from myself if only I had the will to remember them. I must admit that there are some things I did better at 15 than I do now. Somehow, things seemed clearer then, even when it came to what I wanted to accomplish with my writing. There are other things I’ve simply stopped knowing how to do, like letting myself fall in love without worrying about what risks it might entail.

Last night, while trying to dig up resume drafts from my inbox, I found an old email exchange with an ex-boyfriend I dated two summers ago. In it, Summer Guy (his pseudonym on my blog) said one of the most important things anyone has ever told me: “Your writing is beautiful; don’t ever stop.” To which I responded, “I’m more flattered than if you had said I was beautiful. Thank you.” The rest of the emails were about our relationship, about falling hard and fast, about — as I called it then — “love … or its short-term equivalent.” We were writing at the height of our passion for each other, and I found what I said to him remarkable because for once, reading the old Lena brought about a feeling of nostalgia, a sense that I had indeed felt that way in that moment. I remembered her. This hasn’t happened in a long time for me. Recognition of my former self, in place of embarrassment at who she was — or even worse, bafflement — has largely been rare, and yet last night, I could recall what it felt like to love someone.

I don’t love him anymore. At least not in the way that I used to. And though I consider us good friends, I enjoy Summer Guy’s company most from afar … or preferably in short spurts with breaks for good measure. But despite only harboring platonic feelings for him nowadays, recalling how much I once loved him made me smile. It reminded me that relationships are great, and believe it or not, I need the reminder. I’ve been spending the past month trying to convince myself that relationships are the precise opposite of great. Instead, they are emotionally precarious, troublesome, and unnecessary. Maybe I’m clinging desperately to my independence for fear that I will lose some part of myself in the process of falling for someone else. Maybe I simply don’t know how to respond to someone who exceeds the expectations I’ve habitually lowered in light of attached suitors and so-called liberal lovers who later balk at my ideals. Maybe I’m not willing to run the risk of abandonment. But though I’ve been afraid for weeks to make this concession, I must say: by and large, love is worth it. The fact that an email from a former boyfriend can conjure up this rare spark of recognition of the feeling is proof enough.

Love didn’t used to terrify me, and I certainly didn’t think I was scared of it but reading those emails I wrote to Summer Guy made me see how differently I am now behaving in this relationship. Because unlike the community pool, love is more like swimming in the ocean. Once you’re far out, there are no lifeguards or railings, and more often than not, your final destination is not forward but back from where you came. For the girl who used to throw herself headfirst into the water without hesitation, it seems like I’ve taken one too many steps away from the sand to remember that the view is worth it, that drowning is more fear than real possibility, that even those who never properly learned how to swim — or who have long forgotten — are capable of staying afloat.

Do you know what I haven’t had in a long time? No, not a mimosa, though that’s certainly true and a tragedy. No, not sex, I did the horizontal tango last weekend. And no, certainly not sleep, since I prioritize that over even blogging. What I’m missing is far more fanciful and much rarer than any of the above: it’s a crush.

I haven’t had one in over a year and a half. That isn’t to say I haven’t been interested in people, but I think a crush, in the true sense, is different from your typical infatuation. Unlike most of my romantic fixations which are largely bred by indiscriminate, booze-assisted sexual encounters a la typical college movie, a crush is characterized by a kind of unrequited longing. It has a touch of innocence, a pinch of uncertainty, and it creates an unresolved tension absent in relationships consummated by a date or hookup. You don’t know where things are going and you don’t know what exactly is there, but something most definitely is there. You can’t tell if the other person feels what you do or if anyone’s going to point anything out or whether you even really want this strange tango vocalized and acknowledged, because then you’d have to face it — whatever “it” is — and that would mean the internal speculation would cease. You don’t even know how you feel about that, about losing the running dialogue you have going with yourself. That uncertainty is at once frustrating for its lack of clarity and liberating for its endless possibilities. And you think, you’re pretty sure at least, that you have an inkling of what you’re getting into, but really you can’t be sure until you’re already immersed with the water high above your head, and it’s way too late to break surface for air.

That, to me, is what having a crush is like, and is it any wonder that it comes so rarely, especially here? At Harvard, you’d be hard-pressed to find legitimate crushes, to find anyone willing to cede control, willing to toss the key to their heart over to some relative stranger for a thrill ride that they are passenger to. Here life is defined by order and schedules and rules and things that emotions do not abide by. There’s a reason for that. If we allowed ourselves the luxury of taking chances and fixating on people for no reason other than that they are interesting, then we’d risk the foolish act of leaving our fate up to someone’s whims and getting into a situation where no amount of studying or persuading or networking could guarantee our desired outcome. And that is frightening for people so used to knowing where they’re going, what the best routes are, and when they expect to get there.

I don’t sympathize with my classmates. I empathize. I am no less “Harvard” than anyone else here, though I purport to be fabulously unconventional. Part of attraction is not knowing what you’re in for, but I’ve never been the type of person who becomes interested simply because there’s someone I can’t obtain. Like my peers, hard to get isn’t a game I like to play, unless I’m the referee. So when it comes to crushes, I enjoy the butterflies and speculation, but I could do without its share of wrenching doubt and torturous self-questioning. If there’s anything I can’t put up with, it’s not knowing where someone stands. That’s why when I have a crush, it doesn’t last long. I push for a satisfactory result, sometimes come up empty-handed, but either way, have some sort of conclusion, a peace.

There’s someone I think I could fall in like with, which is partially why I’m writing this entry. He hasn’t yet summoned up butterflies in my stomach, but I have a hunch that it’s only because current circumstances don’t allow for the possibility of us. It’s complicated, inconvenient, laced with the sort of obstacles that tempt me to give up and just choose someone a little easier instead. But I don’t want to give up before we’ve even really gotten started. This guy, he’s different, though Kennedy, my best girl at Harvard, argues that I think all the guys I’m into are “different” from our loafer-clad peers. So fine, he’s far from being a real rebel, but he looks at me and well, it’s not the way most guys look at me. When he talks to me, he gets it, he gets everything: where I’m coming from, how little I want to sign up for an ivy-charmed life, my self-consciousness despite the flamboyancy. And in that sense, he sees me pretty clearly, as much as someone can without having lived with me or seen firsthand what goes on behind my bedroom door. So though we may be completely unalike, there exists between us a rare sort of understanding that people don’t just stumble upon everyday.

And when I finish my papers and exams and when all of this stuff in between and in the way is finally over, when I am a bit more sure and I see him a bit more clearly, I think that I could try. I think that maybe I could forget about the map and the directions and the destination in mind and just hand over my keys and let him drive away with my heart and affections wherever he wants as fast as he wants. It’s been a long time since love, even a longer time since like, and I am finally beginning to fall in the latter. I can’t wait to see where he takes me.

I DON’T WANT to fall in love right now. See, I have always bent to the will of others, be they my mother or 11-year-old girls or men who cried love. And this year, for the first time in twenty, is the year of Me. I learned how to say no guiltlessly, do what I want, and care less about what people think. 2007 has taught me what it means to be myself and to be by myself. It is an amazing night at this one-woman party and I am in no hurry to end a damn good time. I love myself too much to compromise on how I want my life to look.

The sexual front is not unlike the romantic. I haven’t had sex in weeks, and the last time was such a blur that I couldn’t tell you what it was like. Drunk on two glasses of wine and more than one drug, I finished off the evening’s irresponsible cocktail with doggy-style and a blowjob. Lips numb and breaths short, we came in the pitch dark on my standard dorm-room twin, first me and then him. I remember straining for it, both of us, but not much else.

My new favorite activity, in lieu of sex and dating, is flirting. It doesn’t really require anything but a casual acquaintance, and I’ve discovered that it’s sometimes the best way to get to know someone. No ulterior motives, no end goal in mind, no games but the ones you make up as you go along. There is something freeing about embarking on a mission to unravel another person, without personal agenda or incentive or even established attraction. I don’t want to sleep with you as much as I want to challenge you for the sake of provocation. I don’t want to kiss you, but I wonder about what it’ll take to get your lips on mine.

This is significant. All of it is significant if only because I am looking at the same life through a different lens in a frame I’ve grown fond of. I used to be terrible at solitude, used to rely not just on men but also on my friends to an unreasonable extent. I was an extrovert because the alternative scared me. I don’t ever want to forget what I feel right now, how I got here, and why I’ve come to like it. I don’t want to forget how to be happy by myself.

THE SCREEN OF my cell phone reads “Just woke up, babe.”

I hit dial at the number. We were supposed to go to brunch three hours before.

“It’s 2 p.m,” I tell him when he answers. My cab is already tumbling toward Center City. “I’m leaving.”

“Man, I wanted to see you.”

“Too late.”

“Where are you?”

“Getting the hell out of here.”

“Really?”

“I’m in a cab. You just missed me.” I am heading to the Greyhound station, rushing back to Boston and to real life. He is barely out of bed.

“Oh,” he says. Then a pause as it sinks in. “That sucks.”

“Your fault, not mine,” I respond matter-of-factly.

“I know, I know,” he says. “Are you mad? You sound mad.”

“I’m not mad. I just don’t like it when people don’t do what they say they will.”

The truth is that I could stay for another day, but nothing — not love and certainly not lust as it is in this case — can compel me to turn around. The previous night, my best friend called and told me in an eerie, even tone that his boyfriend had broken up with him. I almost cried at the news. Fourteen months balled up and thrown out. I have to leave. There are pieces to pick up, a person to worry after.

“When are you coming back?” he asks me.

“Darling, no offense, but Philadelphia is ugly,” I say. “There’s no way I’m visiting again before spring.”

I tell him to come to Boston instead, to be spontaneous. He lets out a sigh, a groan, a whine about how far it is.

“Oh, come on,” I urge him. “We’ll play. It’ll be fun. Just take off for a weekend without a trace. It could be like a movie.”

“Maybe,” he says, non-committally.

“Think about it.”

I hope he seriously considers my invitation, but I don’t expect him to. And I don’t actually care if he comes or calls or likes me or wants to fuck me. I am not even over the Ben Franklin Bridge and my mind is already racing along the Charles.

Out there somewhere, maybe not in Boston or Philadelphia or even New York, but out there somewhere, there is probably true love. Or at least something like it. But this boy isn’t it and even if he were, you know what? I don’t want love. Not the romantic kind, not now, not yet. I can stand to wait. For the moment, my relationship with myself is finally hitting a sweet spot. And besides, if all the movies are right, if there really is a one and only for each of us, then I think I’ve already found mine. She is more beautiful than I could’ve imagined.

“When I close my eyes, I can still remember how you smell.

Tonight, I explained quite simply to my friends that I love you. Even though I don’t like who you are at times, I really do love you. You’ve changed everything quite irrevocably.”

– “Can Remember” December 19, 2006

I don’t have time to fall in love right now, but I’d really like to schedule something for next week. Call (if you have my number) or email elle [at] sexandtheivy dot com. I will forward you my Google Cal.