A Novel Made Me Believe in a Love I Can't Remember

I never thought a novel could do this to me.

I am not talking about crying at the ending or staying up until 2 am. You cannot put it down, or feel a little sad when it is over, because you have to leave the world it built for you. I mean something stranger than that. Something that has been quietly sitting in the back of my mind ever since I turned the last page.

I keep thinking that somewhere out there, there might be someone who was meant to be my lover, and I have simply forgotten who he is.

Funny, right?

It sounds like something a character in the novel would think. Maybe that is where it came from. But the feeling is real, and it has been following me around ever since, this odd, gentle sense that love is not something I am waiting to find so much as something I have somehow misplaced.

I have not been in love for a long time.

Not the real kind, anyway. The kind that makes you want to be better, that makes ordinary Tuesday evenings feel significant, that gives you someone to send a voice note to at eleven at night just because something funny happened and you needed to tell someone immediately.

I miss that. Or maybe I am just imagining missing it, based on books I have read and feelings I have borrowed from characters who are not real.

Either way, when I think about love, the real version of it, the one I would actually want, I know exactly what kind of lover I would be. I would give more than I received. I would show up. I would be protective in that slightly intense way that some people find endearing and others find a lot, and honestly, that is fine because the right person would find it endearing.

I have so much to give. That is not me being arrogant. It is me being honest about a surplus I have been carrying around with no one to spend it on.

The joke, and it genuinely is a little funny, is that I cannot find anyone to give it to.

Not for lack of trying, exactly. More for lack of opportunity, or timing, or whatever it is that needs to align for two people to find each other and both be ready at the same time. I look around at my life, and I genuinely cannot see where this person is supposed to come from. The chances feel thin. Some days, they feel nonexistent.

So I have made peace with a backup plan.

If the soulmate situation does not materialise, I will become the rich aunty. You know the one. The one who shows up to family gatherings with expensive gifts and no husband and zero apologies about either. The one all the nieces and nephews love unconditionally because she spoils them without limits and then hands them back. The one who has a nice car and a passport full of stamps and a life that looks, from the outside, extremely put together.

Honestly? Worse fates exist.

But still.

If you are out there, the person I apparently forgot, the soulmate who is taking his time finding his way to me, I want you to know a few things in advance.

I will love you loudly. I will be protective in ways that occasionally require a calm conversation about personal space. I will give more than you expect and probably more than you ask for. I will be the kind of girlfriend who remembers the small things and makes a big deal out of them, because I think the small things are actually the whole point.

I have been waiting a long time. Not impatiently, exactly. Just quietly, with a lot of love saved up and nowhere to put it yet.

Whenever you arrive, no rush, but also, any time now would be fine, I will be ready.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

(No, but seriously though.)