Cathode And Carbon

I met someone. I have mentioned this in the oblique way I mention things. He is. I don’t have the right word. He is the kind of person who holds still in a crowded room and I found myself orbiting him before I understood I was doing it. He is plain-spoken in a way I find I cannot stop thinking about. He says six words where I would use forty and the six words are always the right ones.

He wants me. In the full sense. I know what that means. I understand the architecture of what he’s offering and I find I want to be close enough to take it and I cannot take it. The wiring isn’t there. I have looked for it. I have sat very still in the dark and waited for it to arrive the way you wait for a word to come back to you when it’s gone temporarily missing and it doesn’t come back because it was never there. It is not a wall. It is an absence where a room should be.

I told him this. He received it the way he receives most things, which is quietly and without making it a project. This is one of the things I find I want to keep finding out about him. He did not flinch. He did not say anything that required me to comfort him about my own limitations, which people do, which I have trained myself to expect.

The thing I cannot say to him is that I feel I owe him a debt I cannot pay in the currency he needs. He is not asking me to pay it. He has been very clear. But it sits in me like a splinter that has gone too deep to get at, this awareness that he is wanting something and I am right there and the answer is still no, not no I don’t want to, no there is nothing to want with. No vacancy. The light is off because there is no light.

I don’t think I’m broken. I want to say that clearly even though I am the only person reading this. I don’t think I’m broken. I think I am a person who is built a particular way and I have mostly made peace with the particular way and then I met someone who makes me wish, for the first time in a while, that I was built differently. Not for his sake. Or not only. For the version of this that I cannot have either.

He stays. That is the thing. I tell him the room is dark and he stays in the dark with me and I don’t know what to do with that.