Waiting.
Nobody warns you that you never catch the exact moment it happens. That's the part they leave out.
It was the end of summer, which you don't need to know. One day the hands are your whole world and then they aren't. No announcement. No ceremony. Nobody sits you down and says look, this is the last time they'll pick you up without being asked. The last time they'll reach for you because they missed the weight of you. The last time you'll fall asleep without wondering whether tomorrow you'll still belong here.
It just stops. And you don't know it stopped until you're already looking back.
You end up on the floor, looking up, watching those same hands close around something else. Something bright. Undropped. Undamaged. Something that has never once had to ask whether it was still wanted. And you're lying there doing arithmetic on it, trying to work out at what point a thing that used to go everywhere with them became something they step over on the way out of the room.
You used to say "two seconds." You'd say it over your shoulder on the way out. Two seconds. I'd count. It was never two seconds, it was an afternoon, and then two days, and then one day you said it and didn't come back at all.
The first time you walked past, I assumed you hadn't seen me, so I waited. The second time, I decided you were tired, so I waited some more. When you finally did pick me up, I was so relieved I nearly thanked you for it.
Imagine that. Grateful to be remembered by someone who was never supposed to have forgotten you.
Tori opened a drawer, put me in, closed it. And I called it waiting, because waiting sounded better than abandoned. Kept sounded better than thrown out. Mostly I called it waiting because I couldn't stand the alternative — that the person who used to hold me flat against their chest could look at me now and see nothing they needed.
The drawer had a smell to it. Old wood. Dust. Something rubbery coming off a torch with a dead battery in it. A hair clip. A receipt. A pen that didn't work. A birthday card from two years ago. I got to know all of it, which is what you do when you've got nothing else.
I learned the bedroom by ear too. The floorboard by the bed. The chair scraping. The little vibration of a phone being picked up. The soft thud of somebody lying back down. That particular silence of someone looking at a screen while somebody else waits to be remembered.
I learned the difference between you being angry and you being empty. I learned the days when your own head seemed too heavy to carry, when every question sounded like pressure, every need sounded like another hand reaching into a pocket that was already empty.
There were days when I knew you weren't choosing anything over me. You were just somewhere inside yourself where I couldn't follow. I knew that. God, I knew that. And knowing didn't make the drawer any lighter.
That's the part I still don't know how to explain. You can understand why someone can't reach for you and still break from not being reached for. You can know their hands are shaking and still need them to hold you. You can love someone who is drowning and still resent the water for taking them somewhere you can't go.
But I wasn't quiet in there.
I rattled the handle. I kicked at the wood. I called your name more times than anybody should ever have to hear their own name. And when you finally opened it, I didn't say hello. I asked where you'd been. How long were you gone. Who were you with. Why did it take so long. When are you coming back. Do you still love me. Are you sure. Are you sure. Are you sure.
I kept records of absence like a bookkeeper. Three hours. Seven. A night. A weekend. As if love were a debt you could settle by producing the missing hours.
I told myself I was only asking for reassurance. Sometimes I was. Sometimes I was squeezing it so hard there was nothing left in my hands but its throat.
You came back sometimes. I wish you hadn't. God, I wish you hadn't. I could have made a life in the dark if you'd only left me there. People can survive almost anything once they understand it isn't changing.
But you opened the drawer. You reached in. You held me. And for four minutes, maybe five, the world went back to its correct shape. Your hands. Your voice. The warmth of your chest. The old familiar sound of a heart I had once, briefly, mistaken for home.
And the awful thing was that my body remembered before I did. I relaxed. I stopped shaking. I fit against you like no time had passed at all.
That's what made it cruel. Not that I had forgotten how to be loved. That I remembered immediately.
I wanted to tell you I'd been frightened. That I'd spent nights shoving at the wood, that I'd pulled so hard my seams had split and the stuffing was coming out and I didn't know how much longer I could hold the shape of myself together.
I wanted to tell you there were nights I tried to decide whether you were gone because you didn't want me or because your own mind had taken you somewhere dark again. I hated myself for wondering which answer would hurt less.
I wanted to ask you why. Not why you'd found something new — that was fair enough. Why there wasn't room for me beside it. Why the same toy, same heart, same history could quietly stop being enough to make you reach. Why something could spend years being precious and then become difficult without changing anything except how much it needed.
You were holding me, though, and I was scared that saying any of it out loud would make you stop. So I said nothing. Shoved the stuffing back in. Hid the damage. Tried to be the toy you remembered.
Other times I did say it. Too loudly. Too often. I said it until there was almost nothing else left for us to talk about.
Sometimes your hand reached in gently and I bit it. Not because I wanted to hurt you. Because by then every hand looked like it was already leaving. That doesn't make the bite harmless.
Then you put me away again. And I called it waiting.
Nobody prepares you for grief aimed at somebody who's still alive. You can't bury them, for a start. You can't put their photograph on a shelf and teach yourself to use the past tense. They're right there. Laughing. Breathing. Sleeping. Scrolling. Having good days and bad ones. Fighting battles inside their own head that you can't see and can't win for them. Living a completely ordinary life while some part of you is still standing at the site of the accident.
And occasionally they reach for you. That's the worst part.
Tori held me so gently once that I spent the rest of the week wondering whether I'd invented the whole thing. Whether the drawer had ever really been that dark. Whether I was difficult. Needy. Dramatic. Whether the problem was simply that I kept asking someone with shaking hands to carry me too.
I'd like to say I knew better by then. I didn't. Or I did and couldn't hold onto it. One of the two.
So you apologize. For needing light. For making noise. For being hurt loudly enough that somebody else has to hear it. You apologize because they're hurting too. Because they're exhausted. Because getting through the day already costs them more than you can see. And then you hate yourself for thinking that, because understanding them has started to become another way of abandoning yourself.
So you bargain. Tomorrow. When you're feeling better. When your head is quieter. If I'm quieter. If I'm easier. If I stop asking. If I stop needing. If I can become one less thing you have to carry. If I get small enough that loving me costs you nothing at all.
And then, because fear is not graceful, you do the opposite.
You make yourself enormous. You tell them you're done waiting and then wait louder. You ask the same question six different ways because none of the answers survive the night. You demand certainty from someone who barely seems certain of themselves.
You become exhausting.
There. I said it.
Not because I loved too much. That's the kind of sentence people use when they want to turn their worst behavior into a compliment. I became exhausting because I was terrified, and instead of carrying all of that terror myself, sometimes I handed it to you and demanded you make it stop.
Sometimes I wanted reassurance. Sometimes I wanted confession. Sometimes I wanted you to hurt enough to finally understand what it felt like to be me.
And sometimes I knew you were already hurting and asked anyway. That's harder to admit.
There were times I knew your head was a bad place to be. I knew you were tired. I knew you were overwhelmed by things I couldn't see. And still I knocked. Still I asked. Still I said, what about me. What about us. What about what you promised.
Sometimes I asked a drowning person why they weren't holding me above the water. I know that now. Maybe I knew it then too. Pain has a way of making fairness feel like a luxury.
I spent a year climbing out of that drawer. A year picking splinters out of myself. Tearing fabric off my own body. Trying to braid a rope out of whatever was left. A year believing that if I could only get high enough, you'd see me and remember.
The mornings you reached for me before you were properly awake. The nights you held me so close I could feel your heartbeat through the fabric of my chest. The way you used to look for me without being asked. The way being wanted used to be so ordinary neither of us thought to be grateful for it.
That I was there before the shine wore off. That I knew the parts of you that were hard to explain. That I sat beside the darkness in you and never once asked it to make you easier to love.
That's not entirely true either.
By the end, I hated parts of it. I hated the places you disappeared to inside yourself. I hated that I couldn't follow. I hated that sometimes the whole world seemed allowed to ask things of you except me. I hated how calmly you could sleep while I was still awake doing arithmetic. I hated the person you became when I was asking for something you no longer wanted, or couldn't, give. And I hated the person I became while asking.
Sometimes I stopped talking to the person I loved and started prosecuting the person who hurt me. I brought evidence. Dates. Hours. Screenshots. Things you said six months ago. Promises you probably didn't remember making. I could build a case. I just couldn't build us back.
The trouble is, once you've climbed high enough to see over the edge of a drawer, you can see the room.
And I could see you. I could see where your hands went when they weren't reaching for me. The room wasn't empty. You hadn't forgotten how to hold things. You hadn't forgotten how to laugh. You hadn't forgotten tenderness. There were still moments when something could reach you. A joke. A friend. A voice through a headset. Something on a screen. A whole conversation that seemed to come easily while I sat there wondering why every word with me felt heavy.
That was the part that ruined me. Not that you had nothing left. That sometimes I could see you still had something left. Just not for me.
I'd spent a year trying to escape a place you had never once tried to help me leave.
I don't know what to do with that. I don't know what to do with the fact that the hands I've been reaching for are the same hands that keep putting me back. That the person I want to run to when I'm frightened is the person whose footsteps I've learned to dread. That I can understand your pain and still be destroyed by what it asks me to live without.
That both things can be true. You can be hurting. And you can hurt me. I can love you. And I can make loving me unbearable.
Nobody has to be a monster for something to die. Sometimes two frightened people just keep stepping on each other's wounds in the dark.
And I know there were times you opened that drawer and didn't find the thing you remembered. You found something frightened and furious. Something that could turn four good minutes into a trial over the other twenty-three hours and fifty-six. Something that wanted to be held and, once held, couldn't stop asking how long it had left.
I know sometimes I made the drawer easier to close. That hurts to admit.
There were probably nights you thought about opening it and didn't. Because you knew what would be inside. Questions. Anger. Need. The same old wounds asking to be examined again. Maybe you missed me and still didn't reach because you were tired of bleeding too. Or you lay there with your hand on the handle and decided you simply didn't have enough of yourself left to give me.
And I was on the other side thinking you had forgotten me.
We were probably both right. I think that's worse.
I know you didn't make me stay every time I should have left. At some point I knew the drawer was a drawer. I knew. And I stayed. Not once. Over and over. I chose the possibility of your hands over the certainty of my own dignity. Because the dark was awful. But the idea of a room without you in it was worse.
I hope the new thing breaks. Just once. Just enough that you have to come looking.
There. That's ugly too. But it's true. Some part of me wants you to find out that new things have seams too. That eventually every perfect thing asks something of you. That novelty becomes ordinary. That one day it will need patience. Reassurance. Forgiveness. Maybe one day it will need you on a day when you have nothing in you to give.
And I hate that part of myself. But it's there. Not because I want you destroyed. I just want the universe, for five fucking minutes, to make sense.
I want there to be some law of physics that says you don't get to ruin something that loved you and walk away lighter. I want there to be a bruise somewhere. Anything. Proof that losing me had weight.
Because the possibility that you are happier now is almost impossible to look at directly. That losing me made your life quieter. Easier. That the drawer wasn't a tragedy for both of us. That for you it was relief. Every time I went silent, maybe you could finally breathe. All the nights I was learning how to survive without you, you were learning how peaceful it felt not to answer. The thing I have spent a year calling abandonment was, to you, finally getting some rest.
I don't know what to do with that.
I keep thinking about the first time you picked me up. Before the drawer. Before the floor. You held me in both hands and looked at me like I was something wonderful. And I believed you. I need you to understand that part. I believed you. Completely. Stupidly. Beautifully.
I knew you were complicated. I knew there were rooms inside you even you didn't like going into. I knew there would be days when I couldn't fix anything. I never wanted you fixed. I wanted to sit beside you. I wanted to learn the shape of the bad days and still be there when morning came.
I thought that was what love was. Staying long enough that somebody didn't have to explain the darkness every time it returned.
I built an entire world in the space between your arms and made plans for a future where my fur went grey to yellow and my seams loosened and you still knew exactly where to find me. I thought we'd get old that way. Worn in the same places. Familiar. A little ugly. Still ours.
I thought the wear would mean something. I thought every year would make me harder to replace. I thought it would make you love me more.
Now I'm lying in a drawer trying to make myself new. Trying to undo the very years I once assumed would make me precious. And that's the cruelest thing you've done to me without meaning to. You made me ashamed of the evidence that I was loved.
Sometimes I wonder whether you'd notice if I stopped climbing. If I stopped pressing my hands against the wood. Stopped listening for footsteps. Stopped checking whether the room was quiet enough for you to remember me. If I just lay down among the birthday cards and the pen that doesn't work and let myself become one more object in a drawer you hardly open.
Would you come looking. Would you notice the quiet. Would there be one night where you reached for the handle and realized I wasn't pushing back anymore. Would that scare you. Would you miss the noise. Would you finally understand that all that knocking was me trying to stay alive in there.
Or would the quiet feel good. Would you sleep better. Would your head finally be a little less crowded. Would my absence become one less thing asking something from you.
That's the thought I can't survive for very long. Not that you might forget me. That forgetting me might help.
I don't know. And after a year, I think I'm more scared of finding out than I am of another night in the dark. Because I can survive the dark. I've proved that. I can survive the silence. The waiting. The footsteps going past. The humiliation of becoming happy over scraps of something that used to be mine without asking.
What I don't know is whether I can survive learning that the person I've been trying so hard to get back to became healthier, lighter, softer once I stopped being part of the room.
And still. Tonight, when the house goes quiet and I hear you, I'll lift my head. I'll put my torn little hands against the wood. I'll listen for the handle. My body will go still. Some pathetic little part of me will think maybe. Maybe tonight. Maybe this time it's me.
Because I remember when I was your favorite. And there's a part of me that remembers and can't be taught the rest of it.
That you're allowed to stop loving something that never stopped loving you. That someone can love you and still not have enough inside themselves to keep choosing you. That sometimes nobody is lying when they say forever. Sometimes forever just ends before either person notices. That somebody can once be home and later become the place you learned loneliness.
Kept isn't wanted. A drawer isn't a home. And being hurt doesn't make me harmless.
I spent a year calling it waiting because I couldn't bear to call it what it was.
I wasn't waiting for you to come back. You were here. You were always here. That's what made it hurt so badly.
I was waiting for you to look at me the way you used to. To reach without being asked. To miss me before I had to disappear. To see all the damage and still recognize the thing underneath it.
I was waiting for you to want me here too.
And there is something worse than realizing someone doesn't want you anymore. It's realizing they did. Once. Really did. That none of it was fake. That there was a version of them who couldn't wait to hear your voice. Who reached for you in their sleep. Who made room for you without being asked. Who looked at you and saw home.
And that person didn't die. They just changed. They're still walking around. Still wearing the same face. Still speaking with the same voice. Still carrying the same hands.
And you have to live with the fact that you were loved exactly the way you've spent a year begging to be loved again.
You know it existed. You remember it. Your body remembers it. That's why you keep knocking. That's why you keep listening. That's why every time the handle moves, some ruined little part of you still sits up.
Because once, a long time ago now, the drawer opened and the hands on the other side were reaching for you.
And the saddest thing about me is that after everything, after the silence, after the counting, after the begging, after all the ways we hurt each other trying not to lose each other, I still don't want different hands.
I want yours.
I want the ones that put me here. I want the ones I learned to fear. I want the ones I still recognize before the drawer is even fully open.
And I know how pathetic that sounds. I know. But if love made sense, I probably would have left a long time ago.
So tonight, if I hear you coming, I'll lift my head again. I'll listen. I'll hope.
Because I spent a year calling it waiting.
And I'm still waiting.
Not for you to come back. Not anymore.
I'm waiting for the woman who once loved me to look through the eyes of the woman you are now and recognize me.
Just once. Long enough to say,
there you are.
I've been looking for you.
Even though we both know you haven't.
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