I Should Have Left. I Didn't.

Two years of chasing someone who showed up just enough to keep me hoping.

I didn't ask for this. That's the part no one tells you about the ones who arrive sideways — you're not looking, and then you are, entirely, before you've decided whether that's allowed.

I know the arithmetic of it by now. Say it, and risk watching it curdle in someone else's mouth. Or say nothing, and let it starve quietly — which is its own kind of loss, just slower.

They were never easy to reach. That was the whole point, I think, looking back. The ones who make themselves available don't do this to me. It was the banter that undid me — the glances I kept pretending not to notice, the way they read me like they'd already had the manual. Too fast. Too much like something I'd have written myself.

Before '21, it was one conversation, nothing more — the kind you don't know to be careful of yet. Then '22 came and rearranged the furniture. A year of firsts, of the particular joy of being wanted by someone I didn't expect to want me back. I didn't see the decision coming until I was already standing in the middle of it.

I've learned this the slow way: wanting something and being allowed to keep it are not the same sentence.

So I stopped reaching first. It happened before I named it — the texts that used to feel like proof started feeling like evidence of something I didn't want to keep collecting. My friends told me to just say it, hand them the words, see what came back. I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. Tired of being the one who starts things.

Stepping back was its own relief. No more timing my presence around theirs. No more the quiet math of will-they. What's left now is smaller and duller — resisting the urge to be the one who breaks the silence — but it's mine, and it doesn't cost what the other thing cost.

Here's what I won't soften: they always had a reason to be unreachable, except when they needed something, or someone to witness them being happy. Friendship isn't a thing you attend occasionally. I know that. I don't think they ever learned it.

There was a version of this that could have been real, if either of us had been brave on purpose instead of by accident. They chose the other road. I think about what we left standing there, untouched.

And still — I'd rather have them at a distance than not have them at all. That's the truth I'm least proud of. Some people you don't get to keep. You just get to keep almost.

This was The Situationship