Everything and Nothing

I've checked my phone forty-seven times in the last two hours. I know because I counted. That's the kind of person I've become, someone who counts every failed attempt to reach him.He texted me six days ago. Had a great time. Three words and a period. I have read it so many times the letters have stopped looking like letters. I've shown it to no one because I know what they'd say. I know what it looks like from the outside.From the inside it looks like everything.We've been doing this for two months. Doing this —that's the phrase I use because he never gave me another one. Thursdays mostly, sometimes Saturdays, and I told myself the inconsistency was just his schedule, his life, the general beautiful chaos of him. Because he is beautiful. Not just his face — though yes, that too, obviously that too — but the way he exists. The way he laughs before he laughs, like his eyes get there first. The way he remembers things I've said in passing, things I'd already forgotten about myself, and brings them back to me like small gifts. The way he makes me feel, when I'm with him, like I am the most interesting room in the building and he has been wandering the halls looking for me.I know how that sounds. I know.But you don't know what it's like to have someone look at you like that. Like you're the answer to a question they didn't know they were asking. I spent so many years not knowing a look like that was possible and then there it was, from a person across a table, and I thought: oh. So this is what people mean. This is the thing they write songs about. I always thought I understood but I didn't understand anything.I've been replaying every moment for six days.The night he drove two hours to take me to the seaside because I'd mentioned, once, offhand, that I hadn't been since I was nine. He just showed up and said get in the car and I did and we ate fish and chips out of paper on the sea wall in the cold and he gave me his jacket without me asking, before I'd even had a chance to shiver, like he'd been paying attention. I sat there in his jacket with the sea in front of me thinking: I could love him. I could love him so easily it scares me.I think I already do. I think that's the problem.I call him at 9pm. It goes straight to voicemail. His voice on the recording is warm and unbothered because he doesn't take himself too seriously, and it sounds exactly like him and I have to close my eyes.At 9:22 I call again. Voicemail.I put the phone face down and make tea I don't want and stand in my kitchen and go through it all again. The rooftop party where he introduced me to someone as just my name — no we're together or she's my— just my name floating there without context and I smiled and held my drink and told myself that he's just not a label person, and that was completely fine. The texts I drafted and deleted, and drafted and deleted, because I didn't want to be too much, so there'd be room for him, so I'd fit into whatever shape he needed, and I did it so willingly and so naturally and I told myself it was because I was easygoing, chill, not dramatic —But really it was because I was terrified. I was terrified of being too much and losing him. I was terrified of the look on his face if I asked for more than he was offering.So I didn't ask. I just kept showing up on Thursdays and hoping.And now he wasn't picking up. At 10pm I'm in my car.I have a whole speech prepared. Nothing dramatic. It's just: I think there's something here and I think you feel it too and I'm going insane not knowing. That's all. I just need to say it out loud and have him say yes, have him say yes, me too, I've been trying to find the words and I was scared you didn't feel the same way so I started pulling away so I wouldn't get hurt — and then all of it makes sense. It'd all becomes the beginning of something.His building has big windows. I always loved that about his place. I told him once that I was jealous of all that morning light he got and he said you can come get some whenever you want and I have been holding that sentence like a spare key ever since.I'm walking down his street and my heart is so full it's almost painful. It's starting to rain and it's late and I'm about to knock on the door of a man who hasn't texted me in six days and I am so stupidly, wildly full of feeling for him that I almost can't stand it. I love the way his eyes crinkle. I love that he remembered the seaside. I love that he gave me his jacket before I shivered.I look up at his window on the third floor.And there he is — his silhouette, that familiar shape of him, the one I would recognise anywhere, the one I have been picturing for six days — and my heart does that stupid involuntary thing where it lifts, it actually lifts, and I think: there he is, there he is, there he —And then someone moves into the frame beside him.She tucks herself under his arm like she's done it a hundred times. Like it's a place she lives. And he pulls her in, the easy automatic pull of a man who is exactly where he wants to be, and he drops his head to say something against her hair.I'm still looking up.The cold has been here this whole time. I'm only just feeling it.

Other insights from Maq

Referral Earning

Points-to-Coupons