JustLikeADream
Favoured Frenzy
Me: For as long as I can remember, I carried an unreasonable longing, to love someone, to be loved, to know what intimacy feels like when it isn't borrowed from stories. I wasn't searching for a person, I was searching for the feeling itself.
Him: You're such a hopeless romantic.
Me: Perhaps. Or perhaps I simply believed that somewhere there existed a version of life where someone would look at me and I would finally feel less unfinished. It's strange, though. I spent years chasing love as if it were a country, never realizing I had become a refugee from myself.
Him: That's understandable. Were you lonely?
Me: Lonely isn't the word I'd choose. I wanted to be free. Free from expectations, from becoming someone's certainty, from carrying the weight of belonging. Yet every time I wished to be loved, another part of me wished to remain untouched. Inside me, love and freedom never learned to coexist. They stood on opposite shores of the same river, calling my name, asking me to choose. So I spent my life crossing between them, never arriving at either.
Him: What was it that you truly wanted from love?
Me: To love someone felt like the sweetest dream. In those dreams, love was effortless. It had no language, no promises, no fear of endings. But every morning I woke with only the feeling left behind, never the dream itself. I could remember that my heart had once been full, yet I could never remember what had filled it. Being loved, however... That was different. It was the kind of dream that arrives wearing the face of a nightmare. I wanted it with every quiet corner of my heart, yet the moment it reached for me, I mistook its warmth for a cage. I feared that to be deeply loved was to owe pieces of myself I had spent years trying to rescue. So I ran, because I was terrified it would ask me to stop being free.
Him: If one day you had to choose between being loved and being free... which would you choose?
Me: I'd choose myself. Not as I'm selfish. But, I have abandoned myself enough times in the hope that someone would stay. I don't think I could survive watching myself leave again.
I turned toward the empty space beside me and smiled. No one smiled back. Perhaps there had never been anyone sitting there. Perhaps the voice beside me was only the shape my longing had borrowed for one quiet evening. And somehow...it hurt just as deeply.
