The man who takes everything and then cannot take his eyes off her. Who arrives with force and certainty and the complete confidence of someone who has never encountered a situation he could not command — and then finds himself in the specific, unfamiliar position of being the one who is slowly, quietly, undone.
Being truly seen by someone who had no reason to look twice — who had every social signal telling them to look elsewhere, at someone more obvious, someone whose value had already been established by the room’s consensus — is a very specific thing to experience.
Wishing, in your lowest moment, for someone to simply appear — not to fix it, just to arrive — is a specific kind of fantasy. To be present in the middle of the wreckage, from somewhere outside the situation, unburdened by the context that made the wreckage possible.
The specific torture of wanting someone you have already decided you cannot have — not forbidden by anyone else, but forbidden by your own code, your own loyalty, your own sense of what you owe to the person who trusted you with someone they loved — is a restraint that costs more than prohibition from outside.
Watching a controlled man lose his composure — one degree at a time, almost imperceptibly, the edges giving way before the center does — is a particular pleasure.
A particular kind of hope carries forward in people who have decided they are finished with it — not dead, exactly, but filed away. Decided against. The person who tells themselves: I tried that, and I know what it costs, and I am done now.
Wanting someone your whole life has told you is wrong — and wanting them anyway — is a specific form of courage that does not always get named as such. The outlaw.
Loving someone who holds themselves responsible for you — who has placed themselves in the category of guardian, protector, the person with obligations toward you that preclude other kinds of feelings — is a specific and patient kind of longing.
Invisibility as a survival skill — not the invisibility of absence but the invisibility of presence — is something women in constrained circumstances learn with precision. Being in the room, fully present, and still not registering on anyone’s attention.
A promise made long ago carries a strange power — the way it waits for you in a drawer or a memory or the back of a thought you thought you had dealt with.