Have I ever loved, I wonder, or have I only craved?
Love must have stillness in it. A room after the guests have gone. A glass left on the table. The knowledge that someone is there without the need to reach for them. But craving—craving is all reaching. It is the hand extended into darkness. It is the body leaning toward a door before the knock has come.
And I have always been leaning.
I have wanted people most when they were leaving. I have found them suddenly luminous at the precise moment they became impossible to possess. Distance gilds them. Silence gives them voices more beautiful than their own. I take what is absent and furnish it lavishly like hanging curtains in empty rooms. I call this love.
But perhaps I have mistaken hunger for devotion.
How easily the two resemble one another when one is starving.
There were nights when I thought: this is it. Here is the person who will quiet everything. Here is the shore toward which all this water in me has been moving. And for a moment there was the extraordinary relief of being wanted—the hand on my back, the message arriving, my name spoken with tenderness—and I thought the relief itself was love.
Then they turned away.
And there it was again: desire, enormous and awake.
Strange that I should become most certain of love precisely when love is withheld.
Perhaps I do not want the person but the closing distance. Perhaps what thrills me is that small unbearable interval between not mine and perhaps. The almost-touch. The unanswered question. The future trembling before it becomes fact. Once I am held, some part of me begins already to look beyond the shoulder holding me, searching the horizon for another light.
What cruelty there is in admitting this.
Because I have been sincere. Every time, I have been sincere.
The heart does not know when it is lying.
It beats just as violently for fantasy as for truth.
Still, I cannot believe that all of it was hunger. There have been mornings—ordinary, unremarkable mornings—when I have looked at someone and wanted nothing from them. Not reassurance. Not possession. Not proof that I was beautiful because they found me beautiful. I wanted only for the morning to continue. For them to remain themselves beside me. For the coffee to cool between us. For time, which takes everything, to overlook us for an hour.
Was that love?
Perhaps love is not the wave rising.
Perhaps it is what remains when the wave has broken.
And perhaps I have spent my life worshipping the crest: that brilliant height where wanting becomes almost unbearable, where another person seems capable of answering every question I have ever asked of myself.
Do you see me?
Am I enough?
Will you stay?
Love may be what begins after those questions grow quiet.
I do not know if I have ever reached that silence.
But sometimes I think I have stood at its edge.
And that must mean something.
For now I know at least this: craving says, come closer, so that I may feel whole.
Love, perhaps, says only:
There you are.
And asks for nothing more.