I Mastered the Signs of Love, But Only Learned to Read Myself

I was twenty-three when a woman I barely knew told me, in the back booth of a Mediterranean place that smelled like burning garlic and somebody's bad night, that you could tell a man loved you by the way he looked at you.

She had a glass of red wine in front of her she hadn't touched. It was getting that weird purple skin on top, the kind that meant it had been sitting there long enough to be embarrassing. Her lipstick was perfect. Her eyes were wrecked.

She said: Watch where his eyes go when he thinks you're not looking. That's the whole thing.

I wrote it down later, in the notes app on my phone. I'd been reading articles in waiting rooms and on lunch breaks. I'd watched body language videos the way you'd study for a test you didn't want to take. I knew, intellectually, that love supposedly had a body language, a signature. The eyes. The ears. The hands.

I'd studied, is what I'm saying.

And I still managed to spend the better part of the next decade confusing politeness for promise. Proximity for intention. Memory for love.