My New Year’s wish is to see you. To sit with you, look at you and you at me, to hear you speak. To know you again, or really for the first time.

I don’t need you to love me. I don’t need your lips on mine or your fingers in my hair or your heart racing under my palm. But to be alone with you, for a conversation, for a moment—I’d take it. It wouldn’t be enough but then again what would be?

I’ve loved you for five and a half years, and there are moments when it takes my breath away. Sometimes I forget you. Sometimes you’re a hazy and blurred and so far in the past I can’t believe I ever wanted you so much. And then, suddenly, easily, sighingly, there you are. It’s familiar, the feeling of loving you, and it centers me into myself, unites the years and faces and the many, many versions of me into one, into coherence, into everything making sense, everything leading me back here, back to you.

I’ve fallen in love since you. I’ve hoped and I’ve wept and I’ve made love, and I was closer to him than I ever was to you. I’ve made playlists and bought condoms and been heartbroken. In comparison, you and I were only a speck, a fragment of a fragment of a second that I probably should have just wrapped in nostalgia and put away.

But there you are.

I can’t explain it or explain it away. What I know is that at midnight I wished for you. What I know is that I look for you. What I know is that I love you. Still and again and with no end in sight.