Come then to the other side of want, of when, and how. And not because I know where.
\nGod knows I have mistaken direction for destination often enough.
\nCome because there are evenings when the miles become strangely visible, when a telephone held in one hand can make a woman hundreds of miles away seem nearer than the empty chair beside you, and a voice through some little black machine can enter rooms in a man he had quite forgotten were there.
\nstrange century, this.
\nwe have nearly abolished distance and somehow preserved every goddamned mile of it. perhaps improved upon the ache.
\nThere are nights when I wonder if timing is only a word we invented because fate sounds too religious and accident too cruel. I have met people at the wrong exits. Loved women halfway between who they had been and whoever they were trying desperately to become.
\nBeen loved, perhaps.
\nThere.
\nPerhaps.
\nA coward's little word sometimes. An honest one too. For what right have I to climb inside another heart and take inventory? I know what I felt. I know what she said. I know what passed between us.
\nThe conversation that should have ended at eleven still breathing at two. The laugh becoming softer. That pause after someone says the thing you had thought belonged only to you.
\nthat small astonishment.
\nthou too?
\nThere are older ways of saying it, but perhaps none better.
\nyou too? you've been here?
\nAnd something in me, older than caution and considerably less impressed by all my accumulated wisdom, said,
\nthere.
\nthere you are.
\nI would like to tell you that at this age a man knows better than to make prophecy out of recognition. I do know better. That is the irritating part. Knowing better has never been quite the same thing as feeling differently.
\nAnd life, I have discovered, has no obligation to arrange itself around recognition.
\nI checked.
\nIt would have been useful.
\n***
\nThere is a particular cruelty in being wanted by someone who can't choose you.
\nNot the clean wound of no.
\nNo has architecture. A door shuts. The room becomes a room again. Eventually the hand learns not to reach for the knob.
\nBut not yet.
\nJesus.
\nNot yet leaves the light on.
\nAnd hope, poor bastard, has always been drawn to illuminated windows.
\nThere are nights I almost wish she would turn it off.
\nThere. I said it.
\nNot because I want less for her. Not because I would trade her freedom for my comfort. But dignity is a poor blanket at three in the morning when the mind has begun furnishing rooms that do not exist.
\nNot forever. I have lived long enough to be suspicious when forever arrives too early in a conversation.
\nSomething smaller.
\nBreakfast. Her bare feet somewhere near mine. My hand finding the small of her back while passing through a kitchen we have already stopped noticing. Coffee. Something burning slightly. A ridiculous disagreement over the proper way to load a dishwasher that somehow becomes one of our oldest jokes.
\nA road neither of us has driven. A hotel in a town neither of us knows, her asleep beside me while rain touches unfamiliar glass. A song we can never hear casually again.
\nTuesday.
\nGod.
\nTuesday is the dangerous one.
\nForever can remain a poem. Tuesday might actually happen.
\nAnd perhaps she sees Tuesday too. Maybe that is the worst of it. Because there would be comfort, eventually, in discovering I had imagined the whole thing. Pride would complain for a while. The heart would make its little spectacle. Then time would do what time does.
\nBut when there is something there...
\nwhen you know enough not to call it destiny and feel too much to call it nothing...
\nwhat then?
\nShe is not telling me there is nothing here.
\nThat would almost be easier.
\nShe is saying,
\nI can't.
\nI can't... come there.
\nNot now.
\nNot... right now.
\nMaybe she is still gathering herself. Maybe learning which pieces are hers. Maybe she has survived things that taught her to distrust exactly the kind of tenderness she now wants.
\nMaybe.
\nAgain with that word.
\nI don't know.
\nThat matters.
\nAnd here my mind begins its old work.
\nperhaps if I wait.
\nNo.
\nperhaps if she understands.
\nShe does.
\nperhaps if I love her well enough...
\nAh.
\nThere you are.
\nThe ancient vanity.
\nAs though love were a key and every locked thing mine to open. As though the distance between two people were just another problem I ought to know how to solve.
\nAnd competence...
\nwell.
\nI have made a religion of that before.
\nA man who could solve the problem, pay the bill, carry the thing, make the call, take the shift, drive the miles, find the answer, hold together whatever had become inconveniently determined to fall apart.
\nThere is satisfaction in being that man.
\nDanger too.
\nBecause after enough years of people handing you broken things, you begin to believe distance itself ought to have a solution.
\nGive me the river then. Show me the far bank.
\nI know load. I know structure. I know what bears weight and what only appears to. Give me lumber. Steel. A few decent tools.
\nHell,
\nI could have a damned bridge standing by Tuesday.
\nExcept she is not across a river.
\nAnd I can't build the crossing inside her.
\nThat is hers.
\nThere are distances no man gets to cross for another. Loving someone doesn't hand you every key. There are wounds you can sit beside but can't climb inside and repair.
\nI hate this.
\nThere is probably a more philosophical way to say that.
\nI hate this.
\nBecause sometimes love can do nothing more than stand at the far bank, lamp in hand, feeling slightly foolish, and say,
\nI would like you here.
\nNo spell. No argument. No debt created by tenderness.
\nJust,
\nI would like you here.
\nAnd leave the choice hers.
\nWhich sounds very noble written down.
\nSometimes it just fucking hurts.
\n***
\nBecause perhaps not... right now means exactly what she said.
\nThere.
\nStay there.
\nDon't hurry past it just because we know the lesson we're supposed to learn.
\nMaybe one day it becomes yes.
\nMaybe someone reaches for her and she doesn't have to argue with herself before reaching back.
\nMaybe she wants.
\nAnd wanting is enough.
\nMaybe she chooses.
\nAnd it may not be me.
\nAnother man may meet her there.
\nHe gets Tuesday.
\nJesus.
\nHe gets the kitchen. The sleepy reach for his hand. The joke nobody else understands. The grocery store. The drive home where nothing happens. Her head against the window. His hand on her thigh at the red light because that is simply where his hand goes now.
\nHe gets the ordinary morning.
\nPerhaps he loves her beautifully.
\nGod...
\nmay he.
\nI mean that.
\nI do.
\n...
\nMay he love her well.
\nThere are sentences the mouth can form before the rest of the body agrees.
\nGive it a minute.
\nBecause if I love her, whatever this unfinished thing is, what else should I want for her?
\nNo, that's too clean.
\nI know what else I could wish.
\nI could wish it were me.
\nI could wish timing had bent. I could wish the miles had been kinder. I could wish she had met me a year later or I had found her a year sooner or life had shuffled the cards one more time before dealing.
\nI could wish and wish and wish.
\nWant is very talented at this.
\nIt can build whole cities where there was only weather.
\nBut wishing doesn't make a claim. She owes me no apology. No gratitude. No explanation.
\nCertainly not herself.
\nNo betrayal here. No villain. Nothing to forgive.
\nWhich almost makes it worse.
\nOnly timing. Only freedom. Only something real that didn't become mine.
\nAnd perhaps that is the first thing on the other side of want.
\nNot that wanting disappears. Not that I become so enlightened I stop aching.
\nGod save me from that man.
\nOnly this:
\nI want you.
\nyou are free.
\nBoth true.
\nNeither gets to make the other a lie.
\n***
\nI have known another kind of leaving.
\nDeath doesn't care whether anyone is ready. It doesn't wait for the sentence to finish. Doesn't reconsider because you finally found the right words at two in the morning.
\nThere is no better argument. No becoming enough. No grand gesture. No airport. No wait.
\nA person can occupy so much of a world
\nand then
\nnot.
\nI still don't know how that sentence can be true.
\nA chair stays a chair. A shirt remains somewhere. A photograph that meant almost nothing on Monday becomes a relic by Friday. Some ridiculous phrase returns that belongs to only two people, and for half a second you turn.
\nThat.
\nThat half second.
\nI think grief lives there.
\nNot only in the funeral. Not in the flowers or the casseroles or the careful faces people make because they don't know what language belongs near ruin.
\nIn the body's refusal to learn as quickly as the mind.
\nYou turn.
\nYou almost speak.
\nYou reach for a person who is no longer somewhere reaching can reach.
\nAnd then you remember.
\nAgain.
\nAgain.
\nAgain.
\nThere were times I wanted grief to be grander than this. Something biblical. Sackcloth. Thunder. A voice from heaven explaining why.
\nInstead it was often stupid little things.
\nA song. A smell. A place in the store. A joke. The instinct to send a message.
\nThe half second.
\nHaving something to give and remembering there is nowhere left to give it.
\nLove continuing its old motion after the beloved has gone.
\nThere are still nights.
\nYears do not remove the grammar.
\nThey only teach you to speak around the missing noun.
\nPeople say grief is a teacher. I have never liked making gifts out of graves. Some lessons cost too much to thank them.
\nBut they teach anyway.
\nI know now that permanence was never included.
\nI apparently neglected to read the terms.
\nAnd no, I am not grateful for death.
\nFuck that.
\nSome things are simply sad.
\nSome things should remain sad.
\nWisdom does not require decorating the coffin.
\nBut this I know.
\nI would still have loved.
\nKnowing the ending.
\nKnowing every awful inch of it.
\nI would still have loved.
\nThat one hit harder than almost anything.
\nBecause the pain did not mean the love was a mistake.
\nIt only proved love had somewhere to hurt.
\nAnd so there is no clean escape. You either risk grief or arrange your life so carefully that nothing can leave a hole when it goes.
\nExcellent walls. Proper drainage. Perhaps a tasteful gate.
\nA perfectly defended life.
\nWhat a lonely little kingdom.
\n***
\nAnd somehow, eventually, you laugh again.
\nThe first time can feel almost obscene. Then you laugh and remember to feel guilty. Then one day you forget the guilt.
\nThen some time later a woman says something, just some strange beautiful little thing, and one of those rooms you had closed begins to breathe again.
\nThe heart...
\nthis absolutely irresponsible organ with no respect at all for precedent...
\nsays,
\nwell.
\nperhaps once more.
\nAnd I have learned not to mock it too much.
\nA mild joke, perhaps.
\nIt has earned that.
\nThe damned thing kept beating.
\n***
\nI have been useful.
\nUseful enough to know that need
\ncan look remarkably like love
\nacross a dim room.
\nAnd I've spent enough years being the one people call when something breaks or needs changing
\nthat it can be hard to notice whether it's you they're reaching for
\nor what your hands and thoughts provide.
\nam I needed?
\nEasy question.
\nam I known?
\nHarder.
\nNot whether the house would be harder to run.
\nOr the bills harder to pay.
\nOr Sunday quieter.
\nOr the empty side of the bed colder.
\nWould she miss the entirely impractical parts of me?
\nThe conversation that begins with one thing and wanders off until neither of us remembers the point. The poem. The terrible joke kept alive well past any reasonable burial. The curiosity that turns one question into twelve. The way a song sometimes stops me in the middle of whatever I thought mattered five seconds ago.
\nThe parts that fix nothing.
\nEarn nothing.
\nProvide nothing.
\nWould she look across a room with no crisis requiring my hands and think,
\nthere.
\nthere is my man.
\nNot because she needs him.
\nBecause she knows him.
\nBecause among all the faces in the room, that one changes the room.
\nI wish I had learned the difference earlier.
\nBetween being necessary and being chosen.
\nBetween someone loving the shelter and someone loving the man who built it.
\nAnd yet even that is too simple.
\nBecause sometimes they did love me.
\nAs much as they knew how.
\nSometimes I loved them as much as I knew how.
\nSometimes two people can give each other something real and still discover, much later, that real was not the same thing as right.
\nThere need not always be a crime.
\nThere need not always be a trial.
\n***
\nAnd I don't get to pretend I was only ever on the receiving end.
\nI have done it too.
\nArrived in another person's life carrying hungers I had not bothered to name. Comfort. Proof. Desire. Somewhere to put something I had grown tired of carrying alone.
\nWe ask people to audition for roles sometimes without admitting there is an audition. Then feel betrayed when they fail to read the script.
\nSometimes a man ought to have the decency to notice his own bullshit.
\nThis is one.
\nI have not always loved wisely.
\nI have confused being wanted with being valued. Chemistry with prophecy.
\nLoneliness, once or twice, with remarkably persuasive evidence.
\nAye.
\nThe heart is an accomplished forger.
\nIt can make nearly anything look official in poor light.
\nSo I'm trying to be gentler with the history.
\nNot blind.
\nGentle.
\nSome people met me because for a while what I could give was what they needed. Maybe what they gave was what I needed too.
\nThat doesn't make it false.
\nDoesn't make it forever either.
\nNot everyone who walks beside us is walking toward the same place.
\nThere are roads in this thing after all.
\nI knew one would sneak back in.
\n***
\nAnd what then is love?
\nCareful.
\nThis is exactly where a man with a philosophy becomes unbearable at dinner.
\nSo let's not define it.
\nLet's watch.
\nA hand at the small of her back with no hidden request attached. Coffee remembered. A question asked and the answer actually heard. Desire that remains curious. An apology without a closing argument.
\nKnowing when to hold.
\nKnowing when not to.
\nBeing able to carry something for her without secretly recording the weight. Letting her carry you sometimes without deciding masculinity has been revoked.
\nThe kiss given because she is near. The stupid message. The private language. The look across a room.
\nthere.
\nstill.
\nthere you are.
\nMaybe love is partly the practice of continuing to notice.
\nNot just seeing the face you first desired, but noticing that the person inside it is still becoming someone you haven't fully met.
\nAnd meeting her again.
\nAnd again.
\nNot saying, stay who I chose.
\nBut sometimes, in the older voice that visits me when ordinary words feel too small,
\nwho art thou now?
\nThere it is.
\nThe old tongue.
\nI would know thee.
\n...
\nNo.
\nCome back.
\nI would know you.
\nTell me who you are now.
\nI am still listening.
\nThat is better.
\n***
\nAnd when?
\nAh.
\nWhen is an insolent little god.
\nI have loved at the right time and watched time run out. Loved at the wrong time and wondered what another year or another city or two slightly wiser versions of ourselves might have made.
\nI have arrived early.
\nLate.
\nAnd once or twice exactly on time for something that could not stay.
\nThere is no philosophy clever enough to make this fair.
\nMaybe fair was never the question.
\nMaybe the question is what we do with the time we get.
\nDid she feel seen while she was beside me?
\nDid I?
\nDid we speak while there was still someone there to answer? Did we laugh? Did we touch in the kitchen? Did we take the drive?
\nDid we make the memory before memory was all that remained?
\nThere is something cruel in the way an ordinary Tuesday can become holy only after it's gone.
\nMaybe we should learn to notice Tuesday sooner.
\nPerhaps the other side of when
\nis now.
\n***
\nI used to think hope meant believing things would work out.
\nI don't anymore.
\nThat is expectation wearing nicer clothes.
\nHope has seen the evidence. Hope has been to funerals. Hope has watched doors close without anyone being wrong. Hope has slept alone. Hope has been useful and wondered if it was loved. Hope has been loved and not chosen.
\nHope knows a woman may become ready after you are gone.
\nHope knows even the one who chooses you is mortal.
\nHope knows there are no warranties here.
\nAnd still,
\nit rises.
\nNot gloriously.
\nLet us not overdo it.
\nSometimes hope rises at six seventeen with a bad back and yesterday's dishes in the sink. Sometimes hope swears. Sometimes hope spends ten minutes looking for the keys already in its hand.
\nSometimes hope is not a trumpet.
\nSometimes it is only,
\nwell.
\nperhaps once more.
\nAnd that is enough.
\nBecause the opposite of fear was never fearlessness.
\nI have no use for that lie.
\nA man who knows nothing can be lost has understood nothing he holds.
\nCourage comes later.
\nAfter the mind has listed the reasons. After experience has laid out the evidence. After grief clears its throat at the back of the room. After want has shown you what it can cost.
\nAfter you know better.
\nEspecially then.
\nThe heart counts the price with shaking hands
\nand says
\nyes.
\nFrightened as hell, perhaps.
\nBut yes.
\n***
\nMaybe this is the other side of want, of when, of how.
\nNot a place.
\nI know. We established that at the beginning.
\nTry to keep up.
\nWant doesn't have to become ownership. Timing doesn't have to become destiny. Love doesn't stop being love because it ended.
\nNot because death took it.
\nNot because someone couldn't choose it.
\nNot even because, one day, she may give another man the Tuesday I once imagined.
\nThis hurts.
\nI don't have to make wisdom out of every wound while it's still bleeding.
\nSome nights the truest thing a man can say is simply,
\nI wanted that.
\nGod.
\nI wanted that.
\nNot the abstraction. Not the lesson. Not some noble opportunity for growth.
\nHer.
\nThe morning.
\nThe kitchen.
\nThe ordinary little life hidden inside the want.
\nI wanted it.
\nAnd perhaps maturity is not learning to want less.
\nPerhaps it is learning not to make a prison out of wanting.
\n***
\nI used to think love was proved by what stayed.
\nMaybe I had it backward.
\nThere are things I have held that death took. Things I wanted that were never mine to take. People who needed my hands but did not always know the man attached to them.
\nPeople I failed to know properly too.
\nAll of it is still true.
\nNone of it is a reason to become less alive.
\nPerhaps that is as close as I come to an answer.
\nNot unscarred.
\nNot invulnerable.
\nChrist, what a lonely victory that would be.
\nOnly still capable.
\nCapable, after graves and closed doors and wrong exits and right people at impossible times, of recognizing something beautiful without immediately asking how to keep it.
\nOf saying,
\nthis mattered
\nwithout making it mean,
\nthis is mine.
\nOf saying,
\nI want you
\nand also,
\nyou are free.
\nOf saying to the dead,
\nI loved you
\nwithout demanding the universe explain itself.
\nOf looking at tomorrow, knowing full well what tomorrow is capable of, and still...
\nCome then.
\nThe coffee has gone cold.
\nAgain.
\nThere are keys on the counter. Something needs doing.
\nSomewhere someone is waking to a life they can't yet imagine. Somewhere a woman is becoming whoever she will be. Somewhere another man is learning, slowly and probably the hard way, the difference between strength and the need to prove it.
\nAnd here am I.
\nNot fearless.
\nNot finished.
\nNot always wise enough to follow my own damn philosophy.
\nBut here.
\nThe world has given me plenty of reasons to despair.
\nAye.
\nI have read the evidence.
\nI have buried some of it.
\nI have loved some of it.
\nI have been hurt by it.
\nI have hurt others in it.
\nAnd still there is this strange, stubborn thing in me that looks at all of it, the grave and the unopened door and the light in the window and the miles and the impossible Tuesday, and says,
\nyes.
\nNot because I know where.
\nNot because I know when.
\nNot because I have finally learned how.
\nMaybe there is no how on the other side of it.
\nOnly because there are things worth loving even when love can't keep them.
\nCome then.
\nWe'll go anyway
\n","wordCount":3133,"charCount":19608,"replyCount":1,"reactCount":0,"reactPreview":null,"reactSummary":null,"shareCount":0,"tags":[],"originDomain":"kwln.city","attachments":[],"createdAt":"2026-09-20T04:17:19.963Z","updatedAt":"2026-09-20T08:52:01.644Z","id":"post:6aaf5e4fc481a621ed94daff@kwln.city","url":"https://kwln.city/posts/post:6aaf5e4fc481a621ed94daff@kwln.city","server":"@kwln.city","summary":"Come then to the other side of want, of when, and how. And not because I know where.
\nGod knows I have mistaken direction for destination often enough.
\n","textPreview":"Come then to the other side of want, of when, and how. And not because I know where…","signature":"mqvCLqa6qRkRUT2fa0kxt6ewX6D57rG6lAG0afiPBgKKEjrIcfinpYjg1Ixl7e/QGjsZcQhza+edHLPCekLmKGUFVq8AeFCYgS6oC0Mg6b4yDubf878t1EKwC3LE8cnqCE36e22lLEMxLxwuQKpgCjba6iZhwREZLkFWfrGrfiq/2eCymkUkgnMKDUCxqDkTq6trRv98JBJAirDiz0WgEGc807hO9WO4p+Z3MPOttwDHxXVnhfHoR1I3ZlTG2ypDKNtFmlzAQkHRAaudOQZFI4Roi3svKdC5JLqSd7eoWN+HN7/+iwuPXiGmXnVoMUh06LEeC/FcbLM+PRisw/EALA==","canReply":false,"canReact":false,"publishedAt":"2026-09-20T04:17:19.963Z","visibility":"Public","featuredImage":null,"myReact":null,"reactCounts":[]}