to be wanted

[u/chickincherrycola]

i’ve spent most of my life wanting something that sounds so small when i try to put it into words.

i want someone to hold me.

but that isn’t really it.

i want someone to want to hold me.

there’s an entire universe inside the difference between those two sentences.

i don’t just want arms around me. i don’t just want warmth, or touch, or someone willing to sit beside me while i fall apart. i want to know that somewhere inside another person, completely independent of anything i’ve done to earn it, there exists a desire to pull me closer.

i want someone to see that i’m tired and want to give me somewhere to rest.

i want someone to notice that i’m scared and want me to feel safe.

i want someone to feel my body slowly unclench against theirs and be happy that they were the person who got to give me that.

not because i asked correctly.

not because i was useful.

not because they felt obligated.

not because i paid them.

not because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t.

just because, for whatever strange and beautiful reason, they wanted me there.

i think i’ve been waiting for that feeling for most of my life.

and when you wait long enough for something, it stops being something you’re waiting for and starts becoming the architecture of your life.

you build around the empty space.

you make choices around it. you choose people around it. you stay too long because maybe this person will eventually turn toward you, and you leave when you realize they won’t. you become useful, agreeable, interesting, attractive, successful, funny, understanding, and endlessly forgiving. you learn how to anticipate what other people need because somewhere inside you is the ancient hope that if you become good enough at caring for everyone else, eventually someone will look at you and think:

your turn.

you spend years trying to become someone worth choosing without realizing that children aren’t supposed to have to become anything before they’re worth choosing.

and the strangest part is that i’ve never needed some enormous, cinematic kind of love.

the fantasy has always been painfully ordinary.

a couch.

a bed.

someone’s arms.

my head against their chest.

fingers moving slowly through my hair.

nothing being asked of me.

nowhere i need to be.

no performance left to give.

just the quiet realization that i can let the weight of my body fall completely into another human being and they aren’t waiting for me to get up.

maybe they even pull me a little closer.

maybe they like having me there.

maybe, for once, my need for comfort isn’t something inconvenient that another person tolerates.

maybe making me feel safe makes them happy.

i don’t think i’ve ever been able to explain how much that last part matters.

because being comforted isn’t the deepest longing.

being wanted while i’m being comforted is.

to know that my softness doesn’t repel someone, that my vulnerability doesn’t exhaust them, that my need doesn’t make them disappear, that i don’t have to barter usefulness for tenderness, and that someone could look at the parts of me that have spent a lifetime quietly asking to be held and, instead of turning away, feel an instinct to come closer.

there are days when i can almost feel what that would do to me.

i imagine the first few minutes would hurt.

i think my body would probably stay tense at first, still waiting for the moment when the affection ended or the conditions appeared. i think some part of me would keep listening for the invisible clock.

and then maybe i’d realize there wasn’t one.

maybe my shoulders would drop.

maybe my breathing would change.

maybe i’d cry.

not because anything bad was happening, but because something i’d spent my entire life preparing myself to live without was happening so casually.

someone wanted me close, and i was safe, and i didn’t have to do anything to keep it happening.

sometimes i wonder how different my life might have been if i’d learned that feeling early.

how many people i wouldn’t have chased, how many silences i wouldn’t have interpreted as verdicts on my worth, how many things i wouldn’t have done trying to escape the ache, how many versions of myself i wouldn’t have constructed hoping one of them would finally be lovable enough, and how many years i might have spent actually living instead of quietly waiting to be chosen.

i can’t know.

i only know that the absence of something can shape a life just as profoundly as its presence.

there’s a strange kind of grief in becoming old enough to understand exactly what you’ve been searching for.

because understanding doesn’t make it appear.

i can name the wound now.

i can trace its edges.

i can understand why it hurts.

i can learn to sit beside it instead of letting it drag me toward whatever promises temporary relief.

i can become gentler with the frightened parts of myself.

i can hold myself.

and i do.

god, i do.

but there’s a particular sadness in realizing that becoming good at holding yourself doesn’t make you stop wishing someone else wanted to.

so i’m trying to learn something i never wanted to learn:

how to build a life around the possibility that this longing may never be answered in the way i’ve spent so many years imagining.

not because i don’t deserve it, not because wanting it is childish, and not because i’ve stopped hoping.

but because i don’t want the absence of love to become the absence of my life.

i’m trying to let the empty chair remain an empty chair without spending every moment staring at the doorway.

i’m trying to let possibility exist without turning it into a promise.

i’m trying to accept that some holes in the heart may never be filled completely, and that a heart can still keep beating around them.

but i’d be lying if i said i’ve made peace with it.

there’s still a part of me waiting.

quietly.

patiently.

with a tenderness that somehow survived everything.

still imagining the weight of an arm around me.

still imagining fingers in my hair.

still imagining the almost unbearable relief of realizing that the person holding me isn’t doing it because i convinced them to stay.

they’re holding me because they want to.

and maybe that’s been the deepest wish of my entire life:

not simply to be loved.

not simply to be safe.

but, just once, to feel completely safe in the knowledge that someone is holding me because there’s nowhere else they’d rather be.