I woke up groggy, still tipsy from the night before, overfilled with feelings I hadn’t sorted through. It wasn’t until I accidentally opened my Notes app that I found a text I’d written that same night. I had no memory of writing it. I couldn’t tell you when or why. But I could still feel the residue of the pain that produced it. It read:
Reach
It’s always almost at my reach, almost at the next heartbeat, almost but never quite there. It never gets to its destination. It gets stuck in a hiccup, a moved hand, a turned body.
It’s always at my reach and yet so far at the same time. I get confused thinking I’ve finally grasped it, but it’s intangible. That’s how love is.
It hides from me. It fills me but never lets romance get near me. It makes me weak and vulnerable and everything I’ve never wanted to become, and then it says it was never there. That’s what love does to me.
Like a fool, every time, without doubt, I believe it. I give it my all, my little all, and I’m not grand enough for them. For it. For him.
And now my heart aches and my eyes are salty, but I have to keep my head high before all of me is shattered.
It’s not my best piece of poetry. I remember writing it pushing some angry tears. But that morning, dry throat, empty stomach, rain banging against the windows, all I felt was disgust. I don’t often write about love and even less in English. Disgust, because this is exactly the kind of paragraph I bury in my Notes and try to forget I ever wrote. I told myself I was angry at how little control I had over it. At how badly I wanted to write about love without it being tainted by heartbreak.
I write love as a third party, doing things to me, withholding on purpose. That’s a convenient place to put the blame. It’s harder to look at the pattern underneath it: I keep reaching for people who are almost available. Almost mine. Present enough to build something on, absent enough that I’m always the one doing the reaching. Love isn’t playing hide and seek with me. I am choosing hide and seek, over and over. A nasty habit of mine.
I always feel like a liar when I write about love. It’s not that I’ve been so wronged I’ve started distrusting people. It’s not that I haven’t had fun with people I loved, in whatever way I loved them. It’s that I’m tired of feeling out of place, tired of the feeling that this person could have been, maybe even was, my person, and I was never theirs. Unrequited love. I feel it most on the nights I already know are the last ones, searching their eyes for something that would tell me to stay and finding a void instead.
So why are we all so obsessed with this?
I actually don’t think we’re obsessed with the same thing, even when we use the same word for it. Some people want to be chosen, want proof that out of everyone available, they were the one worth staying for. Some people want to be witnessed, to have one person who has actually watched them become who they are instead of only meeting the finished version. There are different obsessions than the one the word “love” usually gets credit for. It has less to do with another person and more to do with staying inside a feeling that hasn’t been allowed to resolve.
That’s the part I’d call an addiction, if I’m being precise about it instead of just dramatic. Not to a person, and not even really to love. To the unresolved. To the night where nothing has been said yet, where it could still go either way. I write my best, worst poetry in exactly that window and some quiet, embarrassing part of me may keep opening that window on purpose, because the ache afterward gives me something to write about, and writing about it is its own kind of relief..
My only comfort is knowing I’m not the only one circling. Everyone, everywhere, is looking for something they’ve decided to call love. Under normal circumstances I’d tell you it’s within you and all around you, which I believe, truly. But today the sky is moody and my R&B playlist is playing the most gut-wrenching songs it owns, so I won’t stop there. Love sits in the corner of every conversation and in the mirror while you get ready to go out, and still it’s almost vain to search for it so desperately, since half of us aren’t actually searching for the same thing we’re naming. It’s embarrassing to admit any of this. I have no idea why we all pretend we don’t want to be held at night by someone’s arms. So it goes.
I wish I could become a nun, or someone who simply doesn’t need it. Someone who moves through life satisfied by the love they already have for their family, friends, plants, books. Yet no matter how long I spend trying to talk myself into that, I keep finding poems buried in my Notes app, wedged between grocery lists and my mom’s Gmail password.
All in all, we’re obsessed with different things and love is the word we all agreed to share, because admitting what we’re actually chasing, being chosen, being witnessed, staying inside the almost, feels too specific and too exposing to say out loud. I don’t have a fix for that. What I’d offer instead is this: be careful in your search for whatever you’re calling love. Be careful not to translate yourself so many times that you lose the original meaning. And don’t spiral trying to work out what’s wrong with you, why everyone else and never you. Please don’t. You’ll end up on the floor, stomach growling, heart heavy, for nothing at all, still reaching for a hand that was never going to close around yours.