get comfortable.

He told me that I needed to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And that was sensible advice, in the context of how he meant it. It’s the kind of modern wisdom that sounds grounded and pragmatic. That is, until you are standing at the threshold of something new, trying not to analyze it into oblivion.

This discomfort comes with a fuck ton of question marks.

Is he asking me to accept the natural ambiguity of new love? Is his heart truly here, or is part of it being held in reserve for a future that does not include me? Is he trying to get at something without explicitly stating it? Is he trying to express that this is just a temporary thing? And if he is, can I really be mad at that?

I think human beings dislike uncertainty most when attachment turns another person’s presence into information about our safety. Suddenly someone is part of our daily routine and connection gets deeper, and we begin asking: What are we doing? Where is this going? Am I wasting my time? Do you see a future with me, or is this simply what works for now? Adults need consistency, reassurance, and enough predictability to feel secure but sometimes the demand for clarity conceals a more primitive plea. I am not asking “is this relationship good for me?” I am asking “can you just promise me I will not have to lose it?”

Still, there is an irony here I can’t ignore. I keep wanting to know where this is going as though I have not spent most of my adult life knowing exactly where I am going. As if I haven’t treated my life as temporary for years. As if I haven’t resisted roots, postponed permanence, or kept one eye fixed on the horizon because some private part of me has always known there is more around the bend.

And let’s not forget that I have built entire relationships inside that contradiction. Wanting desperately to be chosen forever while quietly reserving the right to become someone else entirely. After my daughter grows up. After I have fulfilled this particular obligation of one small town school district. After I have made enough money, written enough, become brave enough. After I finally leave the place I have spent years insisting I was never meant to stay. I have been remarkably, and primarily, loyal to a future woman I have never met.

Perhaps what unsettles me about his insistence on the present moment is not that he refuses to promise me a future, but that he refuses to participate in the fiction that I can promise him one either.

Which is inconvenient.

I would prefer to believe uncertainty is something he is doing to me because that makes it easier to solve. If he has one foot out the door, I can interrogate his intentions, measure his investment, look for evidence that I am being foolish. What’s harder to admit is that I may be asking him to provide certainty for a future I have deliberately kept uncertain myself.

And maybe that is why I keep wanting to know where this is going. Not because I need a destination. Because I want to know when and how it ends.

I have always been good at leaving early in my head. I can turn a beautiful moment into evidence for its eventual absence almost instantly. I can manufacture nostalgia while I am still inside the making of a memory. Somewhere between falling in love and enjoying it, I begin preparing to survive it. It is a remarkably efficient way to avoid being surprised by grief but it is also a terrible way to experience anything.

People are strange about endings. We call relationships that end failed relationships, as though longevity were the only convincing evidence that two people mattered to each other. We ask whether we are “wasting our time” when perhaps what we really want to know is whether we will someday regret having given it.

But I have also known permanence without intimacy. I have made plans with people who could speak fluently about marriage, houses, children and forever, while feeling profoundly alone and numb beside them. A person can promise you ten years and be absent from Tuesday. Then there are people like him, who arrive without intention, investment, or promises but somehow love you well enough to return you to yourself.

That complicates the accounting.

I don't particularly like that idea when I am the one who may eventually have to let go. But I dislike the alternative more: refusing to love anything just because I cannot keep it forever.

So I am trying something unfamiliar. I am getting comfortable with things that make me uncomfortable. I am being present.

Is he here?

Am I?

Does this feel good?

Is this meaningful?

Today, the answer is yes…