The thing is, I don’t think Jared even likes me, let alone loves me, and I haven’t really let him know how I feel, because, well, it’s so hard to explain. I’ve been in love before. I’ve had boyfriends before, and one time for a strange and wonderful six months, I had a girlfriend before I decided that wasn’t the way I was, you know? And the love stuff in general just doesn’t seem to work out for me, but at the same time, I get these infatuations. They’re sometimes for some terrible people, and if I’m honest, I think Jared might be a terrible person, too. At least, it’s fair to say that he’s setting off a lot of red flags. He smokes. He’s been married, what, three times? The way he talks about women is disgusting, like we’re all below him. At the same time, though, I just can’t stop thinking about him. About what it would be like to be with him. Romantically, and also, just like, friends? Not because he’s a good person, because he’s not, but because he’s so interesting. He’s so different from the people I usually interact with. I work in an office, you know. Boring stuff. Even if my co-workers have interesting things going on in their lives, they don’t share them with each other. Or at least, not with me. I don’t like to interact with them, and the feeling is mutual, I guess. But Jared, he works in the gift shop on the first floor, and he takes cigarette breaks out behind the building. Who even smokes anymore? I know some of my co-workers vape, but there’s the thing about having a cloud of cigarette smoke hanging around you. People who vape, that’s done as soon as it’s done, but smokers carry their habit with them everywhere they go, and that’s where Jared’s at. He has the stained teeth and the mild cough that goes with it. I hate the smell, and that’s part of what I keep thinking about and how I know it would never work, but my brain still keeps going back to wanting to just get to know more about him, and I just can’t seem to let that go. I feel like it sounds like obsession when I’m sitting here telling you about it, but it’s different than that. I want to study him. I want to know how it is he still exists in this world that has moved past him and his mullet and his AC/DC t-shirt and how he’s just frozen in 1970 even though he doesn’t even look old enough to have lived through it. I mean, that’s really it, I’ve decided: I don’t like him. At all. But I want to explore him, like a museum exhibit. And if I told him that, what would he do? I feel like he’d let me, until he got whatever he thought he could from me, and then he’d just sever me and I’d have to find a new place to buy snacks. So I’ll just watch him from afar and let my brain keep deconstructing him, knowing that whatever I have built inside my mind is just a poor replica of who he really is.