How many corpses in the fire will it take to find a phoenix who can rise from the ashes?

Only one of us is coming out of this alive, and I don’t have much of a stake in it being me. He came after me, he wanted this, so I don’t even have to feel guilt about luring him in.

He’s wonderful, but wonderful is always an illusion if you wait long enough. And I guess that’s ok, because I’m no longer looking for a truth that outlives me or another person’s unbroken promises. We aren’t friends, we will never be friends, and lovers are different. I understand that now.

But he holds me like I’m something he thought he’d lost, and I like it. So let’s play make-believe: you’ll be my fairy tale, I’ll be the ice queen who might earn her redemption, and when the castle falls at the end of the book, I’ll rebuild it alone. I might not be capable of love, but I’ve had years of practice pretending. I’ll give what I have as long as I can, and we’ll see who gets burned in the end.

“Grabbing and pushing when you were going to give it to them anyway. Scared and biting.”

- “Slightly neglected one of eight siblings” card from The School of Life’s Who Should I be With? game

If a storybook romance is possible, maybe a platonic soulmate is too.

And so I find myself contemplating a world where I’m also different, from who I’ve been. Who am I, if not grabbing and scared? How might the people in my life change, when they’re with that less desperate version of me? What can I give them, and what might I get in return?

Roxane Gay, in her Ask Roxane column ‘Where the Hell Is the Love of My Life?’ writes, "When you find the one you just know.” And it’s ironic: for years I’ve believed that my first love somehow managed to fall in love out of revenge after he left me, because everything moved so fast for him. But here I am, weeks into something new, only months out of something else that felt very real, and this time I’m the one who 'just knows.'

It’s certainly possible my heart’s ricocheted itself to a hopeful delusion, clinging desperately to a fantasy inspired by this one who has volunteered so enthusiastically to be grasped. But there’s no spite to it. My mind is cautious and chatters as usual but something in my soul feels settled. Despite that — fuller than I’ve been or that I’ve ever dared to imagine I might be — I miss him.

I miss what he wanted to give me, which was not what I wanted (an all-encompassing relationship without boundaries where we share a life and a mindset and a bed). Instead, he offered a chosen family and a meeting of the minds and an acknowledgement that all or nothing is a false dichotomy. And it took me some time to get here but I’m wondering, finally: maybe he was right about us? Being right has been my consolation prize so long that I almost forgot that my real goal is to be happy.

I’m not there yet, comfortable with the gray and the 80% and the lines in the sand and the obligations to others that mean I don’t come first (even though I used to). But I’m nurturing a budding hope and I can’t help but wonder: What if I could have, not everything I wanted the way I imagined, but more somehow, just differently?

I want to love them both, because I already do. If so much is possible, maybe being ok with that is possible too. I’ve been wrong about so much worse; maybe this time I’m wrong, and it’s good.