a breath

I want to love. Not the love I’ve known too much, the puppeteering of someone long gone, the contractual obligations of family, the carelessness of haphazard friendship. The love I’ve missed, the love I want to explore but somehow lost along the way, like keys in a couch, a hand in a crowd. I know the love I talk of—I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, tasted it. It exists, on the verge of my grasp and the universe; it exists, I’ve let it slip away once—when it exists again, I’ll never let it go. It’s a moment of fantasy, it’s a delusion, a nightmare. But I hope, I hope, when the moment comes—

It will be like an eclipse, a chance when all the visible stars in my eyes line up perfectly. I will know the moment. For me to aimlessly miss a train and book a random hotel, for me to accidentally take the wrong street and casually meet a person there. If I hadn’t tripped and if they weren’t kind enough to help me up, if I hadn’t smiled awkwardly for them to look at me twice. If all the unfathomable chances and stars didn’t drift into a straight line, like an airplane runway for me to take off into their heart.

And once I see it again, I will know the moment. The inscrutable echo of my heartbeat, really, just a breath—inhale, exhale—a moment, where I can watch the stars twinkle and spin, suspended by the magic of human affection, for me to recall everything that has lead me up to this tiny pinprick in the galaxy and universe. The stars will remind me of the first time I visited Los Angeles when I was six, when my parents dragged me up the hills at twilight, and we watched a thousand lives thrum and pass in the flicker and gleam of metropolitan electricity. It will remind me of the first time I saw fireflies in the swampy undergrove in southern France, where I was busy trying to touch one—to caress it, to let it know of its beauty, never to grasp it with my hands, never thinking I was worthy of holding something so lovely—when all my cousins and brother were screaming about ticks; I mourn for them because they never saw those little fluttering balls of light like I did. It will remind me of the time I sat on a ski lift in the middle of a blizzard, eleven years old and cold, when my mom was screaming into her phone about the safest way to get down the mountain. Her chatter didn’t break the spell; snowflakes whipped my face, my face, held their breath on my lashes, and the entire world was a murky white—I was suspended in the air, alabaster fog in the space beneath my skis, dangling above a precipice, and only the occasional churn of the lift reminded me that I wasn’t flying. But I was in a snow globe, I was separate from the world, and I turned to my mother, my cheeks raw and pink from the wind, my fingers numb and stiff, yet I still asked, “What’s the rush?”

My life will lead up to that moment. A moment in my life where my life seems irrelevant in comparison to someone else. A moment in time where I can confide the heaviness of my heart to them. To curse another with something as stupid and honest as I love you.

For me to run into arms that will hold me as hard as I’ve been thinking about them for all these years. Someone new, someone I have yet to meet. Not a soulmate determined at birth or at any moment beforehand, but determined at the moment they smile back, the second my insides pleasantly twist. For me to laugh and cry hard, so hard to make up for all the days I’ve spent without their immovable presence by my side, those days with my face and mind blank, of all the things I could’ve felt but never will again. To finally feel like my wasted youth wasn’t such a waste after all, to clench their drenched shirt and feel like it was all worth it. To look up and say, it’s always been you.

It’s torture. As if I am being punished by the sky for letting her go, for letting go of it. For achieving love once only to turn away. To be given such an improbable chance only to hopelessly turn away. It’s an addiction—I’ve started but stopped, I’ve let it make me crazy. Maybe I will never have a second chance. Maybe that chance has been given to someone else who deserves it a bit more than I do. I will just keep staring at where the sky meets the ocean, waiting. It’s what I’ve been doing. Waiting, wanting.

Human hearts can only do that much; want. Want in the face of the sun, in the shade of the moon, want it until they’re dizzy, want in their dreams, in the tomorrow, in the clasped breaths of a deathbed. It’s the low tide, it’s the quiet whisper…I want. I want. I want until it loses meaning. I want it…

Sometimes, it makes me wonder if we’re even animals at all; the glassy eyes of beasts don’t seem to understand this greed, my greed—it stretches on forever, it twists, it spirals, it broils in the depth of my chest. I’ve learned to ignore it a little, but it slips and falls, like typhoon waves on the lip of a rocky cliff. Bones can only take so much until they crack. It leaks out, hot on my face, and I can only tip my head back, listen to my neighbor’s loud movie nights through the wall with a watery smile. It evaporates on my skin, crackling as soon as I wipe it roughly away and I wait it to pass. I listen to the actress confess her feelings, muffled and unintelligible, and the swell of the music that lets me know of the kiss and the end credits. It’s just noisy enough for me to not notice that my chest has stopped crumbling. Bones mend in a second, and I stop smiling. My pillow dries. My ribs are full of cloudy apathy, full of nothing of substance. I roll over and tell no one of the cave that opened in my chest that night. I fall asleep without letting my mind dissect anything. The cave is dark, tarry, unexplored, temporary, too vulnerable for anyone to see. No one should see. No one should see this waiting, wanting.

I want my heart to be so, so heavy with happiness it feels like it’ll drop out of my chest and roll, heavy and smooth like a stone, onto their waiting hands. I’ll push their fingers over the stone until they’re holding it steadily, and look into their eyes, shed away the vacancy in mine and force all the sincerity I could possibly muster. I love you. I want this love. The I love you that could stop the world. I want someone to claw for my heart the same way I’ve been clawing to the surface my whole life, the unending chase to feel alive in life, to feel the water kiss my fingers but always flit away.

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