The Longing
I used to think longing meant I wanted someone; what I was really feeling was alarm. As a younger me I learned love by way of gaps — attention arrived and left like a tide, so my nervous system learned to treat absence as urgent. Longing became a strategy, a litmus test for whether I mattered. I would chase texts, over-explain my feelings, and interpret delays as proof of failure. Through hindsight I recognize that it felt like survival. Unpredictability required me to be vigilant.
There were small humiliations that left lasting impressions: a cancelled plan that turned into a lesson about contingency, a flippant phrase that looped in my head for weeks, a silence that taught me to imagine catastrophes. Those episodes didn’t feel like ordinary sadness. They felt like erosion — a slow dissolving of trust in myself.
My pivot started with noticing the pattern more than fixing it. I began to chart what longing was doing to me: how it narrowed my day, how it rewired my imagination into worst-case scenarios, how it confused wanting with needing. Naming it as a pattern gave it less authority. Once it had a name, I could step close enough to see its mechanics.
The crucial observation was this: there are two kinds of longing. One carries a timeline and a reciprocal scaffold; the other lives in a fog of uncertainty. When I could point to a plan — a confirmed date, a scheduled call, a ticket — the ache served me. When there was no timeline, no reciprocity, longing metastasized into pain I couldn’t do anything with.
There are memories now that feel tender instead of frantic. I remember waiting for a weekend when we had plans. The gap between seeing each other became a braided cord rather than a noose — I would pick out a song to listen to before the drive, prepare a meal or two we might enjoy together, imagine the way his laugh meets my ear.
That longing lived in details: the scent of his skin, his stories of his successes and striving, the shared space of the drive home. It felt like anticipation. It loosened me instead of tightening me.
What kept me safe was reciprocity, not dependence. They called when they said they would, we checked in, and small agreements were honored — and because I trust my own worth, their calls no longer dictates my calm.
By contrast, I remember longing that felt like slow poison. There was a man I thought I might see again someday. He was excellent at being unavailable with an artistry I mistook for mystery. The not-knowing became an extraction. I replayed messages, combed his social feed for crumbs, and practiced elaborate mental escapes where he would choose me. The absence was indefinite; there was no ticket, no date, no mutual plan — only the possibility that someday something might shift.
That kind of longing didn’t warm me. It hollowed me. It taught me to measure my value against other people’s rhythms. I stayed in rooms that didn’t fit and called coldness devotion. Looking back, the most honest thing I can say is that I mistook longing for proof of love when it was often a rehearsal of scarcity.
I stopped trying to extinguish longing and instead learned to choose its shape. I began to ask two quiet questions whenever the ache rose: “Is there a plan?” and “Is this reciprocal?” If the answer to both was yes, I let myself miss. I allowed anticipation to be soft and even joyful. If the answer to either was no, I treated the longing like a weather report — interesting, informative, but not a command.
I also gave myself small rituals that contained the feeling: journaling, a playlist I reserved for the day before seeing someone, talks with Brooklyn to help process the ache, but never again outsourcing my sense of self. Those gestures didn’t fix everything but they changed my relationship with yearning from reactive to creative.
Now, longing is sometimes a quiet companion and sometimes a signal to protect myself. I still feel the spike when someone delays a reply, but I can name it without collapsing into story. I can hold tenderness for a person and not see them as an answer to my wholeness. Some nights longing lights up like a lighthouse that makes me feel alive; other nights it’s a warning light that calls for boundaries.
The radical part of this work isn’t losing desire. Desire remains. What changed is the contract I have with it: desire is welcome when it comes with clarity and reciprocity; desire is an indicator to get curious about my needs when it arrives in fog. I no longer worship absence. I attend to it.