The Things You Meant to Get Back To

Over the years, you have wanted a lot of things. A friend describes a place. A name stays with you after you hear it. Someone tells you about an evening they had, and you think, yes, that, when there is time. You meant it every time. And every time, you put it somewhere safe, sure that when the moment came, it would be there.

Then the moment comes. A free evening, finally open. You go back for one of the things you saved, and what you find is whatever happens to be closest, something from months ago you had half forgotten. You look for more, and another one turns up somewhere else. You wanted to choose. What you got was whatever you came across first.

You wanted to see all of them at once, everything you had ever hoped to do, so you could pick the one that fit the evening you had. What you got was a few you stumbled into, with no way to know if a better one was sitting somewhere you did not think to look. You went to weigh your wishes against your free time, and you could not get them in one place.

It was never that you failed to save them. You saved all of it. There was just never one place to keep it, only the scattered ways you end up using, a few more every year, none of them gets you what you want. So the wanting did not go away. It just spread too thin to see. You can keep a thing in a dozen places and still never have it in front of you, and you cannot choose what you cannot see.

So the evening goes by while you are still looking. The things worth doing were the ones that needed a little notice, and that head start ran out while you searched for what you already had. By the time the evening came, those were gone. What was left was the easy thing, the one that asks for nothing and is always still there.

You took it, because it was what was left. You wanted the evening you pictured, and you got the one you could get, and you went through it half there, too tired from looking to be all the way in it. You spent the night next to the night you meant to have.

You could have been all there for it. You had just spent what it takes before the evening began, on a search you should never have had to do, so you arrived with less of yourself than you would have.

You knew what you wanted the whole time. The time was there too. What you never had was a way to see it all, together, while the evening was still yours. So the wanting outlasted the chance, and by the time the night came, there was not enough of you left for the part you wanted.