The Terms and Conditions of Wanting You (Or, A Partial Inventory of Emotional Damages Not Yet Billed)

 The Terms and Conditions of Wanting You

(Or, a Partial Inventory of Emotional Damages Not Yet Billed)

I. CONDITIONS

1. You will not love me first.
   You will look at me with interest, with curiosity, with a kind of focused intensity that says, “I could unravel you if I tried.” You will not try. At least, not at first. You’ll ask about the books I dog-ear, the people I don’t speak to anymore, the things I’m afraid to want. I will answer. Not fully, not truthfully—but enough to keep you looking.
2. I will mistake your attention for safety.
   Not because I don’t know better, but because I want to. Because it’s been a while since someone looked at me like I’m a riddle worth solving. Because your gaze feels like a warm room, and I have always walked barefoot into fire.
3. You will leave the door open.
   Not wide enough to be called an invitation, not shut enough to be considered cruel. Just ajar. Just enough to say, “You can come in, but only if you don’t ask for too much.” I will pretend that’s enough.

II. LIMITATIONS

1. I will not ask for clarity.
   I will memorize your silences, your hesitations, your half-smiles that mean maybe. I will build a language out of your uncertainty and call it intimacy. I will translate your pauses into poetry and bleed quietly when you say, “I never promised anything.”
2. You will touch me like a secret.
   Deliberate. Reverent. With the careful detachment of someone who knows they won’t stay long. I will let you. I will file the memory in the part of my body where nothing heals cleanly. Later, I’ll call it a mistake. But I will miss it anyway.

III. WAIVERS

1. I waive the right to be angry.
   I will not rage when you go silent. I will not demand explanation when you disappear. I will tell myself that you owe me nothing, and that love is not a contract I can enforce. I will write you out of my future quietly, without ceremony.
2. I waive the right to closure.
   There will be no goodbye. No last conversation. Just absence, thick and steady, like a fog that never lifts. I will mourn in fragments—at traffic lights, between court hearings, in the middle of a joke I suddenly forget the punchline to.

IV. DAMAGES (UNBILLED)

• One nervous system, re-wired for anticipation.
• Twelve unanswered messages, each one a little less brave than the last.
• One toothbrush I used at your place.
• Four dreams where you said my name like it was safe to stay.
• A pair of hands that now hesitate before reaching.

V. TERMINATION CLAUSE

This arrangement ends when I no longer look for your name in the room.

When the thought of you doesn’t echo like a withheld apology.

When I can say, “He didn’t want me,”

and it sounds like fact, not failure.

Until then,

I remain—

unclaimed,

unbilled,

unraveling.

This is not a contract.

This is what I wrote to keep myself from calling you.

And maybe that, too, is a kind of wanting.