I'm in Love With You
“Heartbeat is coming in so strong.” No seriously. My heart is beating so fast I can feel it in my throat. I’m so nervous. I’m so happy. I just really don’t want to mess this up. I’m sitting at Garage Bar, one of Ann Arbor’s finest watering holes, nursing a vodka soda, which looks more like a vodka grape soda under the purple-ish lighting of the digital juke-box. He’s sitting next to me, his curly brown hair tucked into a backwards baseball hat. My chest is pounding in a skittish rhythm and my senses are overstimulated by the smells of liquor and pizza and the sounds of deafening pop songs and drunk conversations. But it is a perfect moment.
Fuck, I am so nervous.
Let me go back to the beginning: two weeks earlier to be exact. I’m at Rick’s, or Rick’s American Cafe, if you aim to disguise the dingy basement that Michigan students flock to every Thursday and Saturday night as a classy establishment. It’s the first week of classes, which means school hasn’t really started yet, which means an entire week of weekends. No homework and a lot of gin and tonics and mediocre music. My friends and I are doing quintessential college girl things: drinking and dancing and complaining about boys, more specifically, the lack of desirable options in our small college town. But they say you find what you’re looking for when you least expect it, right? I’ll spare the embarrassing details, but here’s the gist. He was dancing with his friends when I noticed him. Tall, dark hair, decently dressed. I announced to my posse that I was going to talk to him, and then I did. I attempted some flirty pick-up line about a certain resemblance to Timothee Chalamet, which worked, shockingly. And the rest is history. I’m kidding. Well, kind of. A blurry Thursday night together repeated itself on Saturday, which turned into a coffee date on Monday, a hangout on Tuesday, and a study session on Wednesday. I don’t remember exactly what came next, but I do know that ever since that first fateful Rick’s evening, not a day passed where we didn’t see each other. It was fun, exciting, and at times, felt too good to be true. So now it’s a Friday and I’m sitting at a table at Garage Bar and I really really don’t want to fuck this up.
The words are bouncing around in my throat, threatening to jump out of my mouth at any moment. I try to swallow them down but they keep crawling back up. It’s way too soon. Like way too soon. Besides, I don’t even know if what I’m feeling is real. I don’t even know what I’m feeling! How can I? It’s only been two weeks.
“Yeah there’s somethin I’ve, been meanin’ to say to you, baby, but I just can’t do it”
Our uber is on the way so I down the rest of my drink before we head back to his apartment on the far side of campus. We settle in to end the night with the movie 8 Mile, an iconic fictional representation of rapper Eminem and his come-up in Detroit, which he makes sure to tell me happened only twenty minutes driving distance from his house, about fifty times. Oh yeah, and we ordered a pizza. I discreetly remove the greasy pieces of pepperoni from my slice — he forgot that I am a vegetarian, but I’m a chill girl, so that’s no big deal. The movie may have started, or maybe it didn’t. All I can remember is him looking at me, breathing short little breaths. He looked as if he had a small frog leaping around inside his mouth.
“Yeah there’s somewhere I’ve been meaning to take the conversation, but I just can’t do it”
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Healy sums it up perfectly. The stutters, the nerves, the confusion, the hopelessness, the exhilaration, the inability to hold it in. You want to say it, but you don’t. You need to say it, but you can’t. “I’m in Love with You,” the sixth track on the album, is cheesy and cliché. It’s so obvious. And while all of those descriptors typically oppose everything that Healy claims to be, the song somehow simultaneously epitomizes the band in this new era. With the essence of a bad eighties love song, and maintaining the musical quirkiness of The 1975, it perfectly captures the feelings of budding love. When your feelings are so strong, you worry that you might not be able to contain them. When all you can focus on is what you want to say, and not saying it.
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His metaphorical frog won. He said it first. And I didn’t say it back right away, I couldn’t get the words out. Though I am constantly declaring my love for my friends and family, concluding conversations with love you or ily, something about the traditional three-word affirmation just felt weird coming out of my mouth. Hearing it directed at me felt weird too, my heart stopped for a moment, my own organs sharing my disbelief. Now I say it all the time, I hear it all the time, I feel it every time, but nothing will ever affect like the first time.
“I’m in love with you”