What It Feels Like to Miss You

Ideally, it would be you.

Your hands on me.
Your mouth.
Your desire meeting mine without hesitation.

I would know what it feels like to be wanted by you without having to imagine it.

Not only sex. Not only hunger.

You.

Your passion. Your tenderness. Your love.

The way you see me.

The way I see you.

All of it finally existing in the same place, at the same time, with nothing hidden and nothing held back.

I think that would have been extraordinary.

To have the friendship and the laughter and the conversations that disappeared entire nights. To know your mind as intimately as I did, and then to know your body, too. To reach for you instead of wondering what it would feel like if I could.

But we don’t have that.

We don’t have some imperfect version of it.

We have nothing now.

I walked, and you are gone.

Absent.

Silent.

And somehow my body doesn’t understand the distinction between losing something and never having had it at all.

I miss your hands even though they never touched me.

I miss your mouth even though you never kissed me.

I miss the warmth of skin I never knew. The weight of you. The intimacy of looking into eyes I never got to see.

I miss things that never happened.

How ridiculous is that?

And yet you made them real enough to miss.

For years, you wrote desire into the space between us. You told me how you wanted me. I told you how I wanted you. We imagined and teased and ached and created an entire language for a physical intimacy that existed everywhere except the physical world.

Sometimes it felt so real I could almost inhabit it.

Almost.

But wanting is not touching.

Imagining is not living.

And words, no matter how beautiful or passionate or sincere, cannot become a body simply because two people ache hard enough for them.

So this is what it feels like to miss you.

It is desire with nowhere to go.

Tenderness with no one to receive it.

A sudden memory that makes me smile before I remember there will be no new ones after it.

It is wanting your voice and finding silence.

Wanting your words and finding an empty screen.

Wanting you, sometimes with an intensity that catches me completely unprepared, while knowing there is nowhere left for that wanting to land.

Perhaps that’s the strangest part.

Ideally, it would still be you. Your hands. Your mouth. Your laughter. Your mind. Your ridiculousness. Your tenderness. Your desire. All of you.

Not instead of the life I love.

Alongside it.

Something real and complicated and extraordinary that belonged to us.

But it isn’t.

And after all these years of imagining what it might feel like to finally have you, I know something else instead.

What it feels like to miss you.