I don't know. Shit. What do you want from me?

There's a television in another room that you can't stop listening to, which would be fine, except you're pretty sure the show was cancelled before the pilot even aired.

No finale. No resolution. Not even a proper cliffhanger — just some network executive somewhere shrugging and saying we're going in a different direction, and the room going quiet, and you, alone on your couch, still waiting for the next episode like an absolute idiot.

This is, embarrassingly, the most accurate way you can describe what it feels like to mourn an 'almost'.

You are grieving a pitch meeting. You are holding a candlelight vigil for a rough draft. You didn't even lose something — you lost the implication of something, which is so much worse because you can't even explain it to anyone without watching their face do the thing where they're being supportive but also clearly think you should have moved on by now.

They're right. You know they're right.

You are also not moving on.

The 'what-if' is the most useless machine ever invented and you run yours like it's load-bearing.

Like if you just find the right angle — the version where you said something different, something smarter, something that landed instead of just hanging there in the air — you'll finally understand what it was. What you were, to them. Whether you were a thought they had and dismissed or a thought they had and kept, quietly, the way you kept them.

You need to know this for absolutely no practical reason whatsoever. The information would change nothing.

You want it anyway.

And you know it wouldn't have worked. You've done the math. You are intimately familiar with the reasons — the timing, the distance, the fundamental incompatibility of two people who wanted slightly different things and were too busy being interesting at each other to say so out loud.

You know. The knowledge just sits there in your chest not doing its job, like a smoke detector with a dead battery, while the kitchen fills up with smoke and you stand there thinking, yes, I'm aware, thank you, very much aware.

Because your brain has decided the gap between what happened and what could have is ideal real estate, actually, and it has moved in with all its things.

The replay runs on a loop — a laugh that lasted a beat too long, a 2am text that meant everything or nothing depending on the hour and your general emotional stability, a moment that felt exactly like the beginning of something and then turned out to be the end of the same thing.

Your brain watches this reel with the dedication of a film student and the critical distance of absolutely none.

You played it so cool, too. That's what really gets you. Masterful. Effortless, even.

Completely unbothered by the whole situation, right up until the moment you were extremely bothered, which you expressed to no one, very successfully, and here you are.

The door closed and you're not even sure when because you were so busy looking relaxed about it being open.

So this is the thing you carry around: a small, faintly embarrassing grief for a relationship that existed mainly as a vibe and some subtext. You can't call it loss because you'd have to explain what you lost and the answer is potential, which is not a satisfying answer, which is why you don't bring it up.

You lost a hypothesis. You are mourning a feeling that was mostly speculation with good lighting.

And still the television plays.

You don't even like the show — you've said this, you've thought it, you believe it on some level.

Mediocre writing. Unresolved tension that probably would have resolved badly. You would have been disappointed by the ending. You tell yourself this with great conviction every time it comes on, and then you sit down anyway, and you listen, and you wait, and you do not turn it off.

You are waiting to find out how a cancelled show ends.

You know how cancelled shows end.

And you keep watching anyway.

It has nothing to do with intelligence. No one really tells you that.

Smart people are everywhere. Smart people live within their own intelligence to tell you what is and what was and what will be.

Smart people bore me to tears.

That's not to say that I'm stupid. I know I am not. But that's not what this is, that's not what we're doing and it's not what I'm looking at.

I look for the shape. The gravity of a thought before it's released. The particular way a sentence is formed. The windows within an inner world and if they face my own. 

Most people experience attraction as a current — something that runs along the surface and sparks on contact.

Physical. Immediate. I am not unaware of this. I've experienced it myself on some occasions. Spark is spark. Attraction is important. I won't argue it isn't.

To most.

Because I'm not broken and I'm not cold and I'm not waiting to be fixed by the right hands. 

I'm just... elsewhere, first. 

I'm in the way you build a sentence. In the pause before a question you haven't thought to ask yet. In the walls and the foundation and the framework of what makes you who you are. In the machine that pumps you out, and in the oil that lubricates you. In the rooms you've sealed. Watching the window you leave cracked open even in the winter because something in you still needs the air. 

It's not like falling. Falling is easy. It takes little awareness.

It's recognition. Like walking into a house and knowing exactly where the kitchen is.

And it is very rare. 

You can go years in a desert of pleasant conversation and compatible schedules and people who are good, genuinely good, who you feel nothing particular toward and you start to wonder if the problem is you.

Is it your fault for building a standard too high for anyone to reach?

Have you built your want around something that simply does not exist outside of your own head?

Have you confused depth with demand?

And then one day, someone comes along and says something — offhand, half a sentence, maybe not even trying — and the room will shift.

And you think: oh. There you are.

The cruelest thing about it is that once you've built a noetiscape with someone, it doesn't come down cleanly.

It's a co-creation. A private country. A shared grammar. Inside jokes that are really just shorthand for entire philosophies developed together over hours long conversations started over something stupid. References that might not translate to another single soul alive. A way of seeing the world that has their fingerprints all over it now, and yours all over theirs, and you can't always tell anymore which thoughts were originally whose.

And when it ends — if it ends — you don't just lose a person.

You lose an entire language.

You find yourself mid-sentence, about to say something in the shorthand, and there's no one there who speaks it. You have to translate yourself back into a tongue that feels foreign now. Common and imprecise. Missing all the words and sounds and feelings and meaning you'd invented for the things that mattered.

I've found it. I've lost it. I'm still looking. These are not three separate stories.

What I want, when I want someone, is this:

I want to build something in the space between us. The space around us. Above us. Below us. That runs through us. Not with a relationship or situationship as the infrastructure. Something primitive, before that, something of you that grows into my space without me even being aware of it. And I with yours. Where the light comes into this scape at an angle that only exists here, in this conversation, in the way our two minds happened to meet on a Tuesday when neither of us was actively trying.

I want to know the shape of your mental oasis.

I want you to know mine.

I want you to make space for me in your thinking the way I'll make space for you in mine. 

I want to build a world with you that exists nowhere else. 

That's not too much to ask. It's just very specific. It's very rare.

And worth every year of the desert in between. 

I.

Before you understand what is happening to you, your body is already aware. 

That is the first thing, the knowing. The knowing happens low and certain, right below the ribcage.

Somewhere beyond your heart but always just close enough.

Close enough to land. To hit.

It is important to be aware that you do not choose this. You do not choose this the same way you do not choose to flinch.

And when it sets in you're already gone.

Lost. 

To the place where a sound begins and becomes a feeling. Where it becomes something else. 

A voice.

A specific voice, pitched just so — low, or unhurried, or rough at the edges in a way that suggests something has been worn down to where it began.

It does not have to be aimed at you. That's the point. It doesn't have to be aimed to fire right where it hits hardest.

It is sweeter when it is. 

II.

Music is different because music is not trying.

A voice can be accused of knowing what it does.

Music has no such awareness of you. It was made in a room you were never in, by hands that do not know your name, and it finds you anyway.

Right there.

Below the ribcage. Same place.

Then the spread.

It is a specific thing — not genre, not mood, something more precise than either of those.

A note held one beat past where you expected release. The moment everything drops away and leaves one voice standing alone in all that open space.

Silence used like a hand.

You will learn to feel it coming.

A half-second of knowing before the sound even arrives.

Your body already answering something it hasn't heard yet.

The song was not made for you.

Your body does not know that.

III.

Here is what you are actually chasing.

It begins at the back of the neck. Or the crown of the head.

High and precise, a single point of ignition. Then it moves.

Down.

Through the shoulders, ghosting skin. A wave that has no interest in stopping until it has gone everywhere it intends to go.

You cannot make it happen.

That is the critical thing. You can only arrange yourself to receive it. The right song. The right quiet. Sometimes the right voice in the right moment catching you with your defenses already down.

Then you wait.

Sometimes it doesn't come.

That is also part of it.

When it does — and you will know, you always know in the half-second before — your body stops being yours in any useful sense.

It is just the feeling and the sound and the place where those two things meet.

Everything else goes quiet. Everything else goes very far away.

And then it passes.

It always passes.

This is the part that is hardest to explain to someone who does not know it.

Not the feeling itself but the after. The way the world reconstitutes around you, slightly wrong, slightly too loud and too solid and too indifferent.

The feeling was so specific and now it is gone and you are still here.

You are always still here.

So you go looking again.

You will always go looking again.