The morning I finally got the thing I'd asked for longer than I've asked for anything else, I stood in my kitchen and felt almost nothing. Not disappointed. Just quiet, in a way I didn't have a word for yet.
The porch light was still on from the night before, its glass a little cloudy with moth dust, the way it gets by late summer. It does that at my mother's house, whether or not anyone is coming home. She just likes leaving it on, in case, the way some people keep a key hidden under the mat long after everyone who might have used it has stopped needing to, or remembering why it was ever put there. I noticed it through the window that morning and thought about how ordinary everything still looked, considering.
I kept waiting for the feeling to show up. The one I'd rehearsed for years, on the nights the waiting felt unbearable. My mother called within the hour, already talking about what came next for me, already three steps ahead, and I didn't know how to tell her I was still standing in the doorway of the last thing.
I have never told anyone this, but somewhere in that first week I caught myself hoping for something new to want. Something to reach toward again. My chest actually ached with it, a small, specific tightness, like missing a person and not a feeling.
Because that's what the wanting had been, I think. Not a hope exactly. More like a companion. It woke when I woke. Some nights it was the only thing in the room besides me. It gave the most ordinary Tuesday a place to walk toward, too. Then one day the door opened, and it wasn't needed anymore, and I didn't know what to do with the room it left behind.
I'd moved three states for this. The suitcase, the blue one with a wheel that catches on every doorframe, sat zipped in the corner of my new apartment for four days. Not because I was busy. There was nowhere left to go, which was, I think, exactly the problem.
My mother asked again what I'd pray for next. I don't remember what I told her. Was it even a Tuesday, or have I just decided it was, because that felt like the right day for nothing much to happen on?
There's a version of this I still haven't said out loud. Some nights I miss the ache more than I miss not having it answered. I don't think that makes me ungrateful. It only means the waiting built something in me the answer never learned how to replace.
The porch light is still on when I visit her now. These days I leave one on myself too, in my own place, for no one in particular, some evenings before I've even decided if anyone is coming.
