i'm a lover, with or without a lover

i love things before they love me back. i think i have always been this way. i fall for a place because of how the light spilled across the pavement on a particular afternoon, and some part of me wants her to have seen it too. i keep a receipt because someone i loved once scrawled something on the back of it, and i think about how badly i want to be the kind of person someone keeps like that. i hear a song once and it fuses itself to that exact afternoon for the rest of my life, and i catch myself wondering which songs will end up belonging to her.

i don’t know how to look at something beautiful and just leave it there untouched. i have always wanted to get closer, to know it the way you know a person you can’t stop reaching for. i want that with her most of all. i want to know her the way i know the songs and the streets and the flowers growing in places they shouldn’t. i want to know her so well that knowing becomes the same thing as loving.

maybe that’s why i write about love so much in the first place. i am a lover before i am somebody’s lover, and that distinction has mattered to me for a long time, but lately it feels less like a distinction and more like a waiting room. people assume this kind of writing needs someone behind it, as if love only becomes real once it finally has somewhere to land. mine never worked that way, not until her. i loved the world before i knew what to do with all that love. songs, streets, old photographs, strangers who smiled at me in passing, the smell of somebody else’s house, the sound of rain just beginning against a window. i loved things that could never love me back, and it never once felt foolish, but god, i am so tired of pouring myself into things that can’t hold it.

there’s something almost unnerving about being built this way. so much of me wants to give itself away without being asked, and every last bit of it wants to go to her specifically. i see something beautiful and want to tell her about it immediately, before the feeling has time to pass through me and vanish into nothing. a line in a song lands just right and i think of her, always her, the one person who would understand exactly why it cut like that. i eat something good and reach for a second fork that isn’t there, and i think about her stealing half of it without asking.

and i want her. i am done pretending i don’t. there are nights when the wanting turns physical, an ache hollowed out beneath my ribs that i don’t know how to explain to anyone who hasn’t carried it. i want to come home to her after a long day and feel the day peel off me at her door. i want to call her the second something ridiculous happens because no story feels whole until she’s heard it. i want to know her footsteps well enough that i could name them from another room without even looking up. i want her to know that i take too long ordering food, that i’ll insist i’m not hungry and then eat half of hers anyway. i want her to catch it when i’m pretending not to be hurt, because i want somebody to know me that deeply, and i want it to be her.

but here’s the thing i’ve had to sit with for a long time now. her absence has never actually drained the love out of me. it has only ever left it with nowhere in particular to go, so it spills into everywhere else instead, and everywhere else has started to feel like a poor stand-in for where i actually want it to go.

it goes into remembering people’s birthdays without needing to be reminded first. it goes into the texts i send at midnight when i know someone has something hard waiting for them tomorrow. it goes into telling people i love their work, their laugh, the way they see things, because i don’t understand the point of holding tenderness in until the person it belongs to is already gone. it goes into buying flowers for no occasion at all. it goes into making tea in my favorite cup even when nobody is coming over to see it, and every time i do it i think, i wish it were her cup too. it goes into stopping mid-step for a sky that never asked to be looked at, and aching to have somebody’s hand to grab in that moment and say look, look at this, hurry, before it changes.

i was a lover before i ever had anyone to prove it to. it was there when i was a kid, long before i had words for it, in the way i got attached to places i barely knew, in the way i hoarded little things other people would have thrown out, in the way one song could rearrange the entire weather of an afternoon i thought was already over. it was there in how much i cared about people who never even knew they had left a mark on me. all of it, this whole life of loving things that couldn’t love me back, feels like it was just practice. like i was learning the shape of it so that when she finally showed up, i would already know exactly how to hold her.

and selfishly, i still want her. i want her name in my mouth before i’ve even opened my eyes in the morning. i want to be the one she calls first when something good happens and the one she calls first when something breaks her open. i want to know what she looks like asleep, what she looks like angry, what she looks like when she thinks nobody’s watching her. i want to be there for the version of her that hasn’t happened yet. i want to give her every receipt, every flower, every song that ever belonged to an afternoon, because i have so much saved up and nowhere to set it down but her. i want to hand her all of it, the whole overflowing weight of it, and watch her realize she’s the reason i kept any of it at all.

i want to stop turning around expecting no one. i want to turn around and have it be her.