So, I might text her, and I’m saying that out loud now, which already feels like a commitment I did not formally agree to, because the stage feels bigger somehow even though nothing has moved and the lights are just… softer, like the world has decided to stop interrogating me for a second, and I’m standing still—not stuck, not frozen, just not running anymore, which is new—and I take this breath that isn’t dramatic, just necessary, and I think: okay, this is a thought I’m allowed to have. I might text her. Not in a big, emotional, late-night way, not a paragraph that starts with “I just wanted you to know” and ends with me accidentally confessing to twelve feelings I haven’t unpacked yet. I’m not a Hallmark card. I’m barely a group chat. I don’t do sweeping gestures; I do awkward drive-bys. So it would be something small. Almost stupid. Like, “Hey. How’s the painting?” Or, if I’m feeling brave in the specific way that looks like sarcasm from the outside, “Do you still make nipples out of papier-mâché, or have you evolved into something more respectable?” And I know, I know, that could go a thousand ways, and maybe she’d respond, just casually, like no time has passed and nothing ever went wrong, or maybe she’d stare at her phone and think, who is this, and I’d have to say, “It’s Tallulah. You know. The girl who panicked when you leaned on her elbow in 2019 and then ghosted because of unresolved patriarchal trauma.” Just… normal. Casual. Very chill. And the thing is, I keep almost doing it. Like, I’ll open the message, type half a sentence, stare at it like it might bite me, then close the app and pretend I was checking the weather. And it’s not because I’m lonely—though, fine, yes, I did name my kettle, but that says more about my capacity for irony than my emotional state—and it’s not because I want to rewind my life or fix anything or prove I’ve grown. It’s because she wasn’t part of the circus. She didn’t take anything from me. She didn’t ask me to perform or explain myself or turn my insides into a talking point. She didn’t offer a platform or a panel or a goddamn softbox. She just liked art. And sandwiches. And she had the kind of boobs that made you feel like life might still surprise you, but in a consensual, well-lit kind of way, the kind that doesn’t demand a personality transplant in exchange. And look, I’m not saying I want a girlfriend, or healing, or brunch, because that’s a whole genre of intention I am not emotionally insured for. I just want to know if she’d want to go to a museum with me, and stand silently in front of something vaguely modern, something that looks like it’s made of feelings and metal, and pretend we understand it together. Maybe our hands would touch, accidentally, on purpose. Or maybe we’d just end up arguing about composition and negative space and whether it’s genius or a scam, and then somehow making out in the coat check line because museums do that to people. Either way. Honestly. I think I’d survive it.

Okay. Here’s the hypothesis. And I hate it. I hate it on principle. I hate the way it sits in my mouth, like unsweetened optimism mixed with the tears of someone who owns too many scented candles and keeps insisting they’re subtle, when they are absolutely not subtle and neither is this feeling. I keep pacing while I think it, because if I stand still it might solidify, and then I’d have to acknowledge it as a real thought instead of a temporary glitch in my usual operating system, which is sarcasm and emotional fire exits. But what if—
and I am absolutely just spitballing here, no peer review, no clipboard—what if something good actually came after all this. Not a fairytale, not a sweeping transformation montage where I suddenly have better posture and a soft-focus backlight, not a Netflix miniseries with bad lighting and a forced redemption arc where everyone forgives everyone else because the episode count demands it. Nothing aspirational. Nothing cinematic. Just something… less terrible. Something that doesn’t feel like the universe patting me on the head while quietly moving my goalposts again. Like, maybe I don’t end up alone in a studio apartment, boxed in by the ashes of burned bridges and those sexually confusing watercolors I swear made sense at the time but now just look like feelings I should have processed with a professional. Maybe that’s not the final frame. Maybe I end up with someone who asks first. Someone who understands that consent isn’t foreplay’s nerdy cousin but the entire foundation of the house. Maybe I get to sleep next to someone who doesn’t see my body as a statement, or a scandal, or a think-piece waiting to happen, or a mid-term project worth two credits and a faculty hearing. Maybe I get to be a person instead of a case study. Or—lower the bar, Tallulah, let’s be realistic—maybe just someone who knows how to make a decent grilled cheese without turning it into a metaphor for gender roles. No discourse. No lecture. Just bread, cheese, heat, restraint. A miracle, really.

I don’t expect happiness. I’m not new here. I’ve read the literature. I’ve done the coursework. I know happiness is a slippery concept, often misquoted, usually oversold, and rarely delivered without fine print. But the thing is—and this is the part that keeps sneaking up on me—I’ve survived worse. Considerably worse. And statistically, that has to count for something. If this were a punch card, I’d have earned at least one small reward by now. Maybe one person who texts back within the hour. Maybe one person who doesn’t own a ring light or use the phrase “building my brand” without irony. I could be wrong. I usually am. That’s kind of my brand, actually. But science—real science, not the vibes-based nonsense I usually run on—science demands we test the theory. And I hate that. I hate that I’m even considering it. But there it is, glowing faintly in the corner of my mind like a pilot light I forgot how to turn off, this stupid, fragile idea that maybe, after all this, the next thing doesn’t have to hurt quite so much.

Look—I’m not there yet, and I know that because if I were there I’d probably have a better word for there, something smoother, something with a glow to it, something that could be printed on a tote bag and sold at a discount during a retreat, but I don’t, so all I can say is that I’m not there, not standing on some enlightened overlook where everything finally makes sense and the past lines up neatly behind me like a well-edited contact sheet, and I’m definitely not some enlightened phoenix rising from the ashes with a matching bra-and-therapy set, color-coordinated growth, a neat narrative arc that ends in empowerment instead of mild confusion and chronic skepticism, because I still check every room for exits without thinking about it, still map them automatically like my body is convinced that one day I’ll need to leave very fast for reasons I won’t have time to articulate, and I still flinch when someone uses the word “muse” unironically, because it sounds too much like a polite way of saying object with aspirations, and I still cannot, to this day, walk into an art supply store without remembering the time my left nipple was used to demonstrate “natural light,” like it was a helpful teaching aid and not a memory that refuses to stay in its lane, and I wish I could say that’s a funny anecdote now instead of something that quietly rearranges my spine every time I smell charcoal or turpentine, but it isn’t, not fully, not yet. And still—and I really hate admitting this, because it feels suspiciously close to optimism, which I do not trust—I might be getting closer, not to a finish line or a breakthrough or any of those before-and-after miracles people love to post with identical lighting and wildly different captions, but closer to something that doesn’t have a good name, something smaller and less impressive and therefore much harder to fake, and no, not healing, absolutely not healing, that word has been emotionally strip-mined by yoga instructors, life coaches, and people who sell essential oils on Etsy with a side of unsolicited advice, so let’s not call it that, let’s call it tolerating myself, which sounds underwhelming but feels radical on certain days, tolerating myself in public, tolerating my own presence without bracing for impact, without armor, without rehearsing a backup explanation for why I exist in case someone asks or looks at me too long, without that constant low-grade readiness to justify my own shape in the room. And maybe Cassie is part of that, or maybe she isn’t, maybe she’s not a symbol or a lesson or a hinge point at all, maybe she’s just the first person I didn’t immediately want to Photoshop myself around, the first person whose gaze didn’t make me instinctively crop my edges, soften my angles, preemptively apologize for taking up space, and I don’t know what that means, if it means anything, and I don’t know what happens next either, which used to terrify me, absolutely paralyze me, because I was always trying to get ahead of the story, outline it, control the lighting, anticipate the reveal, but for once—and this is new—I don’t need to know, I don’t need a deadline or a statement or a clean little plot twist to justify the pause, I don’t need to promise anyone that this is leading somewhere neat, I can just be here, Tallulah, standing in the middle of it, uncropped, uncaptioned, unfinished, and somehow that feels less like failure than it ever has before, and maybe that’s the point, or maybe it isn’t, but either way, finally, I’m not rushing to explain it.