if you want me, you better speak up

i am so tired of almosts. i am so tired of standing in the cold of something unsaid, stomping my feet in the slush of your hesitation, cold and exhausted and wanting nothing in the world except you, and swallowing that too, because we have both agreed without agreeing to play this game where the person who says it first loses something. where wanting too visibly is the thing that kills it. where you have to perform indifference about the thing you want most or risk watching it disappear because you scared it away by simply being honest about how badly you needed it to stay.

i am done performing. i am done translating. i have spent years receiving subtle and turning it over in my hands at 2am trying to find the meaning inside it, trying to decode the almost-touch and the pause and the way you looked at me for just a second longer than you needed to, building entire architectures of hope out of things that were never said clearly enough to hold any weight. i am tired. i am tired in the specific way of someone who has been waiting so long for something to just be said plainly that the waiting has become its own kind of grief.

so say it. say it with your whole chest, in the street, in the cold, in front of everyone, in a way that cannot be taken back or reinterpreted or softened into something safer. kiss me like you are not worried about what it means. reach for my hand the way the ocean reaches for the moon, not because it decided to, not because it thought it through and concluded that reaching was the reasonable thing to do, but because something at the very core of it has no other option, has never had another option, was made entirely for that pull and does not know how to be anything other than pulled.

grab me by the sleeve of my black jacket while a record spins somewhere behind us. pull me closer in the middle of the sentence. stop being careful. stop treating this feeling like it is something fragile enough to scare away. kiss me like neither of us has another place to be. kiss me like you are exhausted too. like you are tired of pretending you do not feel this thing pulling at you every single day.

press me into the brick of some ordinary wall on some ordinary night and let it be inconvenient. let it be witnessed. let the windows see it and remember it long after we have moved on to the next moment. let there be nothing subtle about it because i cannot survive another thing i have to decode alone in the dark. i want the thing that is so clear it needs no translation. the wanting that arrives without footnotes. the feeling that says this, you, here, now, without leaving any room for me to wonder if i imagined it.

i want you to shout at me when i get hurt. i want you to find me sitting on the edge of the bathtub trying to clean the wound myself, insisting it’s not that bad when it very clearly is. i want you standing in the doorway for a second, worried, frustrated, already knowing i’m about to downplay it. then i want you to walk over, take the bandages from my hands, and tell me to stop being an idiot for once and let somebody help me. i want you to know me well enough to hear what i mean when i say “i’m fine.” i want you to sit on the edge of that bathtub and take care of my wounds, and let me look into your eyes while you do it.

i want you to see every stubborn, frightened part of me that keeps trying to survive alone and refuse to let it. because i think what i want is simple. i want someone who looks at me trying to stitch myself back together and says, "move," as if it never even crossed their mind that i was supposed to do it alone.

i have imagined too many things that turned out to be nothing.

i have held too many almosts like they were real things and watched them dissolve the moment i reached back. and i am not doing that anymore. i am not standing at the edge of what you almost mean, waiting for you to decide whether i am worth the full sentence. i am not making myself smaller so the wanting feels less threatening. i am not pretending i am fine with the in-between when the in-between is slowly taking something from me every single day.

and i am done with the red string theory. i am done waiting for the universe to confirm what i already know. because if there was no string tied around our hands, if fate forgot us, if the cosmos were looking somewhere else the day we found each other, i would take the string myself and bind us with it. i would not wait. i would not leave it to the stars or to destiny or to the slow turning of some divine plan that may or may not have accounted for us. i would choose this. i would choose you. on purpose. with both hands. without being asked to.

because i want you in a way i have never said to anyone else. and i have said things to people. i have tried. i have used the words and meant them as much as i was capable of meaning them at the time. but this is different and i know it is different because it lives somewhere deeper than language and it has been there long before i had the courage to look at it directly.

i need you. i do not think i have ever stood this open in front of another person and said it is you. it has been you. i would find you in every version of every life and i would choose you in all of them, i would not need a string to find my way to you, i would just know, the way i already know, the way i think i have always known.

i am so tired of the cold of this. i am so tired of everyone and everything except you.