Here is There

On loving someone you can never fully have.

I learned to stop measuring time the day I realized it did not apply to you.

Before that, I had a life that moved forward in obedient increments—morning, afternoon, evening; expectation, effort, outcome. Things used to make sense, and I used to fit inside them.

Then you arrived—not late, not early—just out of sequence.
Which I mistook for coincidence, though it carried the weight of recognition.

You never stayed, and I learned that quickly, even if no one ever said it.

You appeared without pattern: a train platform at dusk, a grocery aisle I didn’t remember entering, my own living room once, sitting on the floor like you had always been there—like the furniture had been arranged around you.

And every time, you spoke as if we had just been together moments before.

“You’re getting closer,” you said once, brushing your fingers along my wrist.
“To what?” I asked, but you only smiled, like the answer had already happened.

I tried to build something from it, and I tried to impose the old scaffolding:

What are we?
Where is this going?
When will I see you again?

You listened—patient, almost tender—but there was always a flicker of something behind your eyes, not avoidance, not refusal, something probably worse… something like my questions unraveled the moment that was trying to contain you.

“I am here,” I said, as though it meant anything at all.
“Here is there,” you answered, faltering, momentarily undone.

Time began to loosen around me, not in obvious ways, nothing dramatic, just in small fractures. Clocks that disagreed with each other, messages I didn’t remember sending already replied to, days that felt like they had been folded, creased, and pressed back into place slightly wrong.

You arrived with a past that didn’t include me, but somehow did. I started to understand, then, not fully, never fully, but enough to feel the edge of it—that you weren’t inconsistent; you just didn’t belong to anything that could hold you.

You moved through me the way a current moves through water—touching everything, belonging nowhere, existing everywhere, arriving at points I had not yet reached and leaving the ones that I still clung to.

For you, this—whatever this is—was complete.
For me, it was only fragments—glinting, broken, and mine alone to carry.

I asked you, once, in the quietest voice I had, “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” you didn’t hesitate, that one word settled into my bones like something ancient and irreversible.

“And will you stay?” I asked.
And there it was again—that flicker, that impossible, gentle sorrow.

“I do,” you said, as you pressed my hand against your chest.

Your heartbeat was steady.
Familiar.
Wrong.

“I am with you,” you continued, “just not all at once.”

I think that’s when my life began to peel away from me, not violently, but as if it was loosening its grip. The routines I once trusted started to feel like props, my reflection lagged sometimes a split second too late, and my memories rearranged themselves around you, even in places you had not yet appeared, or had, or would.

I stopped asking when you would come back, because you always did.
Just not to the version of me that was asking.

The last time—or the first, I can’t tell anymore, when your lips found mine—I remember you stepping closer, and for just one single moment—I felt it, not your presence, but your totality. Every version of you, every moment you had ever touched me, layered and simultaneous, every almost, every not-yet, every already-gone.

It was too much.
It was perfect.
It burned.

“I can’t keep living like this,” I said, though the words felt smaller than the truth.
You touched my face, looked into my soul, said nothing at all.

I don’t remember making the decision, and I don’t remember choosing, but I remember the feeling of something in me unfastening from sequence, from before and after, from expectation, from wanting, to needing, to letting go.

Was I arriving, or had I already left?
Because I see you everywhere, not metaphorically, not poetically—everywhere.

I see you in the reflection of glass that doesn’t belong to me, in conversations that haven’t happened yet, in the space between breaths where something watches, patiently, lovingly.

You are constant.
Unavoidable.
Inescapable.

My old life is still there, I think, still warm, waiting for a version of me that understands time the way it used to be. But I am no longer moving forward; I am moving through. I am drawn to you, entwined with you, undone by you.

And the strangest part—the one that eviscerates my soul—is that I don’t question your love anymore. I feel it, I feel you, yet I still don’t know where I stand.

And I can’t tell if I followed you here or if I’ve let myself believe this love was always mine to walk into.