When you kiss someone, kiss them with both hands, kiss them like you are holding on tight and won’t let go. Lean in for the kiss like you are both in a musical and the score is swirling around you — as if your dress or her dress or both of your dresses will be blown up by the wind at any moment. Pretend you are like people who are holding each other after a long war is over and peace has been declared and you are being photographed in black and white. Kiss them like it’s going to be hung on someone’s wall someday, as a reminder of what love can be like.

When you kiss someone, don’t church kiss them, unless it’s the kind of kissing you do when you sneak into the confessional booth after hours. Give every part of your mouth to the kiss, but try not to eat their face because you want to have some of their face left to kiss later. Do not swallow their tongue because you’ll need it to let them explore the parts of your mouth that most kisses miss. Put your hands on their neck or use your hands to caress their hair (without them feeling like they are being strangled), like their body is being pulled into the kiss, and they just might fall inside of your face. Kiss them like every neuron inside of you is firing at the same time, every cell inside of you has suddenly sprung to attention and every part of you is consenting to this moment.

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I want a Tuesday kind of love. The sort of thing that involves little dreaming and scheming; the sort of thing that comes paired with too-strong coffee and too-loud songbirds and the drone of the news at 6 a.m. or any time before the sky finds its identity, really. A Tuesday kind of love that isn’t indulgent, one that doesn’t stop the earth from spinning but maybe keeps us grounded in spite of all that uncontrollable movement.

I want to split the bill and pay the bills and not get lost in some unsustainable delusion where the rest of our lives become inconsequential. I want us to be human, I want to argue, I want to take too long in the shower. I want to hear about the horrific lines at the DMV, about a boss who doesn’t get it, about plans to pick up the laundry after work. I want stories of strangers on the bus, of a child who looked lost but turned out not to be, of chance encounters with high school classmates because these seemingly colorless instances are meaningful when filtered through the eyes of someone I care about. A Tuesday kind of love, breathing relevance into otherwise monotonous moments.

A Tuesday kind of love is this: commuting to work knowing that someone cares about what you’re going to have for lunch; understanding that you do not have to be your dynamic, charming, weekend self this time; this time you can butcher sentences and make bad jokes and trip over thin air and it won’t change anything. A Tuesday kind of love is when weekends and weekdays are one and the same, expanses of time where unpredictable, irreplaceable closeness exists, swells, bursts. Tuesday is directionless conversation about things that happened five hours or five years ago; it’s knowing where he keeps his receipts and when he has a doctor appointment; it’s ordering Chinese food or taking his parents out for dinner because they’re in town or forgetting to eat because you’re full of each other’s words and there’s just no room for anything else.

I don’t want to dream through our lives together, don’t want to sleep in, don’t want to put on my sunglasses and pretend that life’s a vacation. The fantasy is that I want to exist in reality; the fantasy is to be there for someone on a Sunday morning but also on a Tuesday night, when the haze and laze of the weekend has worn thin and seems far away as ever. I want a Tuesday kind of love.