if i'm an option, don't choose me

i have lived long enough being an option in people’s lives. i know what it feels like to wait for somebody to make up their mind about you while pretending you are perfectly fine with waiting. i know what it does to your body when you are lying beside someone and there is this awful little question sitting between you, something neither of you says because saying it would make everything real.

you start reading everything. the pause before they answer. the way their hand feels different in yours. how often they reach for you without being asked. you go to sleep with your mouth dry from thinking and wake up already wondering what you did wrong. and somehow you become very good at making uncertainty look like patience.

please don’t do that to me again.

if you have to think about whether you want me, take your time somewhere else. i mean that. i would rather watch you walk out of my life than watch you stand in front of me trying to decide whether i am worth staying for. there is something humiliating about being loved with hesitation. you can feel it. you can feel when somebody is giving you a portion of themselves while keeping the rest somewhere you cannot reach.

you can feel when their heart is still looking around the room. and i have spent enough of my life trying to convince myself that if i am patient enough, understanding enough, easy enough to love, eventually someone will look at me and stop wondering. i don’t want to be easy. i want to be certain.

i want to be the person you call before you have figured out what you are going to say. i want you to see something beautiful and have my name arrive in your mind before you can stop it. i want you to reach for me because there is nowhere else you would rather put your hand. i want to know what it feels like to be chosen by somebody who has already made the decision somewhere deep inside themselves, somebody whose love does not require a meeting with every other possibility before it settles on me. i want that kind of certainty so badly it embarrasses me to admit it.

i know, i know what i am like when i love someone. there is no little part of me standing at the door calculating what happens if it does not work. when i love you, i am already there. i remember the stupid things. i notice when your voice sounds different. i know when you are pretending you are fine. i will remember how you take your tea even after you forget that you told me. i will make room for you in my life before you have asked for the space. and the part that hurts the most is knowing how completely i am capable of choosing someone, and knowing how many times i have been loved by people who still had one eye on the exit.

i have been somebody’s second thought. i have been the person they came back to when something else failed. i have been the comfortable place to land after they had spent their time looking for somewhere more exciting to be. i have been told that i mattered while being treated like i could be replaced. i have swallowed that contradiction so many times that there were days when i could barely tell the difference between being loved and being tolerated. i would lie there and hold the bedsheet in my fist, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand how somebody could say they loved me and still make me feel so disposable.

i don’t want to know that feeling again.

i don’t want to have to ask where i stand. i don’t want to measure my place in your life by how quickly you answer me or whether you remember to reach for me or whether you seem happier when somebody else walks into the room. i don’t want human connection to feel like a mind game where everybody is pretending they care less because caring first feels dangerous. i have no interest in becoming smaller so somebody can feel safer loving me. i have no interest in pretending i don’t need you when the truth is that i do, and i want someone who can hear that without turning my honesty into a weakness.

if you are unsure about me, please leave me alone. i mean that with everything in me. don’t hold my hand while you decide whether you want to keep it. don’t kiss me while wondering if somebody else might be better for you. don’t tell me you love me because you are afraid of losing access to me. don’t keep me close enough to soothe your loneliness while you figure out where you actually want to belong. i cannot survive being somebody’s temporary certainty again. i know what happens to me there. i start questioning every good thing. i start apologising for needing reassurance. i start looking at myself through your hesitation and wondering what is so wrong with me that you cannot simply choose.

there is nothing wrong with me. there was never anything wrong with me. i was just asking the wrong people to give me a certainty they did not have.

so if you come into my life, come because you want to be here. come because when the choice is between me and the life without me, there is no debate happening inside you. come with both feet inside the door. come knowing that i am going to love you with the same terrifying fullness i have always loved with, and knowing that i need somewhere safe for all of that love to go. i cannot keep handing my whole heart to people who are only holding it until they find something else.

and if you cannot choose me, please don’t choose me at all. let me go before i start building a home inside your uncertainty. let me walk away while there is still enough of me left to recognise myself. because i have spent years learning how to live after being someone’s option, and i swear to god, i do not want to learn that lesson from you too.