Wanting

There was a brief second mere months ago that forever altered the course of my life. I suppose that can be said of all big alterations. A driver that missed the chance to brake. A man too consumed with his fury to stop himself from swinging. A girl who decided to trust that the scruffy man in the pickup sincerely needed directions.

Or perhaps, something on a smaller, but largely significant scale. Choosing not to mail the letter. Deliberately ignoring the phone call. Standing in front of the person you know that you shouldn’t, asking them without words, to love you. In every tiny concession, in every tear shed and venomous word slung through the air- life altering moments.

And maybe all we are made up of are these moments, because they’re the only ones that I can look back on and recall with such force, that it knocks the breath out of my lungs. Like a fish out of water, I inhale sharply searching for relief. Sometimes it comes, sometimes not.

A few months ago, I was just another person moving through a seemingly insignificant series of motions. There was a routine and a comfort in that. The lull was almost enough to make me believe that I was satisfied in the way that only you can be when you’re afraid to really open your eyes.

But in the second that his lips touched mine. In the moment after, when I chose to walk away. In the weeks stretching onward that he somehow convinced me not to…well, that was the undoing. Because then I understood with perfect clarity that I was filled with much more wanting than I could ever have imagined. And that wanting burned me up for months.

Wanting does not travel alone, however. Its nearly indefatigable companions were Loneliness and Waiting. Every so often, Despair would catch up. By far, the most difficult to entertain was Desperation. I understood the others. I could pinpoint the precise ways that they needed to be felt. Desperation was simply this incessant clawing, aching, suffocating mess that resided squarely inside each lung. Desperation was prone to borrowing all of my Self-Respect and Inner Confidence and sullying them before giving them back.

Ultimately, Wanting led to Pain. And though I was no stranger to it, I turned and ran in the other direction anyway.