I grew up on a dirt road that didn’t have a name, just a mailbox with our surname peeling off in the sun. Out there, love stories were simple. You met a boy at the rodeo or at the pub on a Friday night, you slow-danced to a country song, and by harvest you were someone’s forever.

That’s what I believed, anyway.

When I moved to the city at twenty-two, I packed that belief in my suitcase between my good boots and my grandmother’s pearl earrings. I thought love would find me quickly. I smiled at strangers. I said yes to dates. I mistook attention for intention.

The first man I met wore polished shoes and told me my accent was “cute.” He took me to a rooftop bar where the lights blinked like distant stars. He spoke about investment portfolios and weekend trips. When he kissed me, it felt like a scene from a movie I’d watched a hundred times in my bedroom back home. I thought, this must be how it starts.

It didn’t start. It ended the next morning with a polite text and a promise to “catch up sometime.”

There were others.

A bartender with kind eyes who said he’d never met someone “so genuine.” A gym trainer who liked the way I laughed. A musician who wrote half a song about my freckles. They held my hand in public, traced circles on my back in private, and whispered that they felt something different with me.

I kept believing them.

I told myself that intimacy meant progress. That if they wanted me, if they desired me, then surely love couldn’t be far behind. So I gave pieces of myself away in dim apartments and rumpled hotel sheets, under fairy lights and ceiling fans that hummed in the dark. I learned the rhythm of new bodies, the warmth of shared breath, the heavy quiet that comes afterward.

But morning always arrived colder than I expected.

I’d lie there staring at unfamiliar ceilings, wondering why closeness at midnight felt so far from connection at dawn. They would kiss my shoulder and rush off to meetings, to friends, to lives that didn’t seem to include me past the night before.

Back home, my friends were getting engaged. Posting photos in fields of golden wheat, hands laced with someone steady and sure. I double-tapped their happiness and told myself I wasn’t jealous. I was just… waiting.

People assumed I was wild. The city had changed me, they’d say with a wink. They didn’t see the hopeful girl underneath it all—the one who still believed that the next date might be the last first date. The one who studied every smile for sincerity.

I wasn’t looking for thrill or conquest. I was looking for that quiet certainty my parents had, the kind that doesn’t need fireworks because it burns steady and bright. Instead, I kept finding sparks—hot, dazzling, and gone before I could warm my hands.

Maybe I was naive. Maybe I confused chemistry with compatibility. Or maybe I just hadn’t learned yet that love can’t be negotiated through longing.

But I still keep my grandmother’s pearls in my drawer. I still say yes to dates. And somewhere beneath the city lights and the lessons learned in tangled sheets, that country girl is still looking—not for another night, but for someone who stays when the sun comes up.