I want to ride bikes together. I want it so badly. I want to ride back and forth over the little bridges that cross Canal de Lachine, the small slit that cuts Pointe-Saint-Charles off from the rest of Montreal. I want crazy things. I want it to be sunny, or maybe it is raining and we are wearing rainjackets, not minding the rain. I even want to ride side by side and hold hands on the bike path to Marché Atwater and get a pastry and eat it there on a little table outside. That feels like a lot to want, but at the very least I want the riding side-by-side thing.

I want to sit in La Fontaine Park again with them, both on the grass and on the stage in the outdoor theatre. It could be summer again, or it could be this time of the year – autumn. Even spring, the early part of spring when it’s too cold really to be sitting outside. I like to think of it in the summer, or the late part of spring, or the early part of autumn. Maybe we’re talking, or maybe we’re not, maybe we’re just laying there, and after, maybe we’ll walk somewhere and buy sandwiches and eat them sitting across from one another.

Wanting is physical. I feel it in my body, all over. I feel it behind my eyes, in the inside corners of my eyes, where the wanting wells up. I want so much. I don’t know how to tolerate this much wanting.

I want to not be on my own after we have sex. I want not to be left alone but to be stayed with. When they fall asleep in my arms, I don’t want to feel the pressure to wake them because I am worrying that they should be leaving. I very much want to have them sleeping in my arms again and I like to think that next time I won’t wake them, and that this time I would let them sleep.

I want to watch them move, watch their body move, the way it moves so similar to my own. I want the sameness in their body, the sameness that is in so many other parts of them as well. I want how we’re similar and how we’re different and how they startle me by doing something that I do and that I think no one else does. I want to kiss them on their head and explain to them why it is okay they are the way they are, the way my partner has done for me. I want to pass that on to them, like a gift that has passed hands. I want to feel the fold in the skin at the back of their neck, that part of them that feels tender to me and familiar, the same way I feel about the zipper on my jacket that won’t close.

When I let myself want wild things, I want to take them to where the fireflies are. I want to sit on the trampoline in the dark or lie in the field or stand by the edge of the road and watch the lights floating in the air in silence. I want to go maybe an hour, or at least fifteen minutes, without saying anything. I want to say nothing and for them to not say anything either, because perhaps on that day we would have already spent several hours together, and so then time would feel long enough for us to stop talking, stop explaining ourselves to one another. I want all the urgency to bleed out. I also want to have more of the urgency and the explaining and the telling of ourselves. Hesitantly, cautiously, casually, as if it doesn’t really matter even when it really does matter. I want more of the little things slipped in by them that make me feel seen and cared for and understood in some small way, those little things that they give so carelessly.

I want to ride the metro alone. If we go to the station together at the end of a date and they go to the Honoré-Beaugrand platform and I go to the Angrignon platform, I want this time for them to look up and look at me – not even wistfully, the way I look at them, but simply, and being unafraid, they could look right at me, where I am standing across the tracks looking back at them. I want a mutual look before a train breaks our view and one or the other of us boards and departs. I want to feel a little sad on the train but also content and each time a little pensive that it might never happen again and that that was the last time. I want to be wrong about this, I want it to happen again, painfully or not, tenderly or coldly, gently or with a harsh look. I want to be left sometimes, shaken, with tears, but always then repairing and always happening again.

I want to sit on the fire escape at the small rented room on Rue Saint-Denis together. I want us both to watch the squirrels, instead of me always watching the squirrels alone after they leave. I want us to watch old movies or old television in black and white. I want to lay there idly, our time precious but spent recklessly. If we don’t spend it it’ll just go to waste so we spend it however we please, watching television or going on walks or talking about whatever we like. I want to sit on the bank of the Saint Lawrence and throw rocks in it. I want to sit on a park bench at Parc Saint-Gabriel and let them be on their phone while I watch the black squirrels pick birdseed out of the grass, not needing their undivided attention at all times. I want to be unselfish and easy. I want another time to be selfish and difficult and cry and raise my voice at them again and to be forgiven again. 

I want for everything to feel to me so big and so hard at times, and still love them, or whatever it is that we are doing, whether it is loving or caring or just casually knowing one another in a wild, reckless, senseless kind of way.

It feels dangerous but I want for them to return my visits to their city with a visit to my village, and I want to show them all of my favorite places. I want to undress at the far beach at the pond and not watch as they undress but dive headlong into the water and emerge a good distance from shore and turn and watch them, cock swinging between their legs, walking slowly into the water. I want to sit on the tailgate of my pickup on Maple Hill and watch the sunset with them, I want to show them the ducks and geese in their little pen down the dirt road towards the farm. If they visit in summer, I want to find a Dobsonfly and show it to them. I want to show them the pearl oysters in the Winooski, I want to go on a long drive and listen to my favorite albums and ride with the windows down and our arms out the window, and maybe they will make waves with their hand and arm in the draft the same way I like to. I want the kind of things I do with my friends every day, ordinary plain things, but I want to do these things with them, as if they are a person in my life and not just a disconnected figment.

I want to watch them make breakfast, I want to wake up next to them. Maybe just a couple times a year, but still, I want that. I don’t know why I want this. The wanting feels uncomfortable and out of place between us. I want to watch the way they eat, the way they eat so hungrily like there is a hole inside of them that won’t overflow the way mine does. I want to lay on the couch in their kitchen and read while they do whatever it is they do in the kitchen. I want to sit together on their porch with their dog and then another time sit on my porch with my dog. I don’t want to do this every day, or even every month, but I would like to do it sometimes, to have a small routine that we slip into, a small fragment of our lives that we share on a weekend in May or August.

I want so badly all these things.

It doesn’t make sense how wanting something so small hurts so much.

They all seem like reasonable things to want, if they were things other people wanted, but because it is me that wants them, it feels wrong and gross and too much. It feels like wanting these things is an expression of what a pathetic person I am. I know how disgusting I am for wanting things like this. I hate myself for wanting these things, and still, I want them all the same.

I want them so much.

I can’t articulate. There is no articulation of wanting that can hold exactly how I feel. It is both a very big feeling and also a small feeling, the size of a wren that I cup in my hands.

I hate myself when I want these things. I feel a cloud of shame, and still, still, I want.

I want to ride bikes. I want to float in the pond. I want to spend an afternoon doing nothing. I want to sit in the park. I keep coming back to the sitting in the park. It is the thing I want most of all, except for the sex, and I cannot write about how much I want the sex.

I don’t want to be left, sitting on the edge of the bed or standing, projecting a cracked illusion of some false chill, at the door. Except that I do want these things and I ask for these things. I ask to be left and ask for space and for silence, and I never really ask them to stay or to speak gently to me or to hold me, I only say “you may” when they ask if they can kiss me or hold me or take me out to eat or spend a little extra time with me after we have sex. I don’t really, actually, ask for much, and I don’t know how to ask when asking feels like suffocating, when being asked to stay feels like a violation when other people ask it of me. I half ask them for things and give up easily and project the false chill, avoiding them saying no, preempting them maybe saying no by not really asking. 

You may kiss me, you may go when you need to go, you don’t even need to excuse yourself, not really. You may hold me or put your mouth between my legs, or you may stay for a bit after you finish in me. I won’t ask for anything else except when I do, and then I’ll pretend I wasn’t really asking, I’ll backtrack, if you half say no by saying maybe or maybe later or yes but hesitantly yes. I don’t know how to ask without pleading and even when I don’t ask it still sounds like pleading in my own head. 

And then I will do all the holding of my own wanting and my own not asking and my own grief, a grief that exists not at the distance that separates me from them, but a grief at my own inability to ask and receive, my own fear of what loving someone might entail, my own acceptance of things hurting while I do none of the repairing and only say I’m sorry once or twice, when really, I am sorry for much more than only one or two things. I’m sorry for a whole lot of things. Most of all, I’m sorry for being the way I am. The being sorry isn’t for them, the being sorry is for myself. I’m sorry I’m this way, I’m sorry I keep hurting myself, I’m sorry for so much. I would change if I knew how to. I’m trying to change and I’m sorry it’s taking so long and that there is collateral damage, but this hurts me more than it has ever hurt anyone else.

So I will want and want, and the wanting will hurt but I will keep wanting things like bike riding and park sitting and pond swimming, and the wanting of these things will keep getting fogged up with shame and I will say very little of any of this directly to them or to anyone I’m having sex with. I will continue to be disgusted at myself for wanting and I will still keep wanting. They will maybe know this about me but I will have plausible deniability and we will never talk about it.

But still, I hope I will keep wanting. I want to keep wanting and keep having, if only in small pieces. I want to try again with them or with someone else. I want to keep making long drives to the city and having long periods where we don’t communicate and long hours in bed and on the floor and the couch and anywhere else we can think to do it. I want to keep having cycles of what feels like breaking up and then getting back together, repairing our breaks with a handful of words that cause us both varying degrees of pain but that are necessary. I want to keep trying new things like going for walks, or having late-night dinner visits, or sitting by river edges, or any other of the multitude of small commonplace ordinary things that ordinary people having ordinary dates do, in between and before and after the sex we have, the sex that we arranged to be a casual thing, the sex that I can’t write about. I want to keep doing this, with them or with someone else. I want to feel okay about wanting. This is what I want more than all the other things, more than I want them, more than anything else.