I Wish

For nearly fifteen years, I have made the same wish. Every time I have extinguished my birthday candles, seen a shooting star, blown on a dandelion or encountered a new, supposed, wish-granting superstition, I have made the exact same wish and wished it hard. The wish? Well, it has always been yours of course. I have spent all my wishes on you, for nearly fifteen years.

Tonight, at thirty-four years old, it finally occurred to me that perhaps, I should make just one wish for me. Then however, I realized the risk. Like playing the same numbers in the lotto every week for years and years until finally, you give up on them and make up some anew and then there they are. That night, your old numbers come up. Just like that, in an instant, a realization that years of diligence and devotion were in fact for nought.

Now, I don’t know what to do. I want so badly for your wish to come true. But my wishes which have always waited patiently behind yours, don’t want to wait anymore and I am losing the power I’ve always had over them to control them. Very soon, I will need to make a wish too.

I didn’t know that love would take hold of me quite this way when I was a nineteen year old girl, standing on the street, smoking a cigarette, waiting for a date that would never happen but that would in fact lead me to you. I couldn’t know then, when I was a cocksure, sanguine, independent and intrepid young woman that in the face of true love, all are rendered helpless and vulnerable. Even though I thought I knew it all, I certainly did not know that when you love someone, their life is of infinitely greater value to you than your very own.

It’s likely a shrink could find a hundred different ways that I am loving incorrectly or unhealthily. Annually-recycled, Cosmopolitan articles would convincingly preach to me about making enough emotional space for yourself and taking care of your own needs too etc.. Oprah would say it also. And they’re all probably right, to a degree. But I don’t want to love any other way, other than with all that I’ve got. With everything I’ve got.

So here I am, spending all my wishes on you.