October

At which point of one’s independence will it be translated as the longing for love?

Let me master the game of play-pretend scenarios, creating images of moving motions too perfect to resist.

Let me forget my pride in self-sufficiency, in the journeys I take alone, in the fact that my proudest achievements come from my own mind and my dreams don’t involve anybody else.

Let me indulge in a glimpse of what could be: a universe where I throw everything away for a simple life. Let me fall in love with the smell of morning coffee when I walk down the stairs in the morning. In soft embraces around the kitchen, sly smiles and soft touches and all.

Let me visualize Sunday strolls around a city, it looks like Amsterdam in the summer, and feel a hand holding my own and hear laughter and see the books we read at the park.

Let me doubt all my doubts about love: how I sometimes think that long-lasting love is given to the good kind of people, and how certain I am that I don’t make the cut – with all my bad decisions, downward spirals, inescapable defiant nature, and zero remorse to myself.

Is this what it means to be twenty-three? To have ambition burning so bright that you’re willing to lose sleep over it. To work towards goals with all your being, yet have the urge to leave it all behind for small talks after tiring days, to risk losing life full of excitement for stability.

And there is still so much of this world that I do not know, so much of myself that I don’t understand how to explain. Something in me knows that I still will spend many lifetimes drowning in my anxiety for tomorrow, in uneasy slumbers when my heart beats loud, in quiet days where I have no one to talk to — inevitably resorting back to the awareness that I, alone, lonely, am still very much sufficient.

So today I make a fantasy world built on your sweet nothings, decorated by how softly you say my name, scented by how easy it felt to silence my busy mind next to you. Let me imagine it all: the what-ifs and what-could-bes, the probably-nevers and the pipe dreams. Let me live in all of it while I still have you.