The Things That Never Arrive

There are things you can want

with your whole body

and still never be chosen by.

This is not a failure of language

or posture

or faith.

This is not because you asked wrong

or waited poorly

or didn’t ache with enough discipline.

Some doors remain closed

because they are not doors.

They are walls

that look kind in certain light.

We are told wanting is a virtue—

that desire, if kept pure,

will be rewarded.

But want does not earn its place.

It does not vote.

It does not tip the scale

simply by being sincere.

I have wanted things

that would have ruined me.

I have wanted things

that would have saved me

and still never came.

The wanting felt the same in my chest—

that is the cruelty of it.

You learn this slowly:

hope does not guarantee arrival.

Prayer does not obligate heaven.

Love does not promise reciprocity.

And none of this means it was foolish

to kneel.

Some nights you realize

you are grieving something

that never existed,

except in the way your life bent around it.

You grieve the version of yourself

who would have lived there.

You grieve the rooms you furnished in advance.

The body remembers futures

the mind was never given.

The taste of tomatoes repulses me.

That sentence belongs nowhere,

which is why it belongs here.

Life continues its errands

while your private apocalypse

learns to sit quietly.

Acceptance does not arrive gently.

It does not knock.

It settles in like weather—

unasked,

inescapable,

indifferent to your readiness.

You stop bargaining first.

That is the beginning.

You stop saying if only

like it’s a spell.

You stop measuring your worth

by what did not stay.

This is not peace.

This is gravity.

You carry what didn’t come

the way others carry scars—

without explanation,

without apology,

without demanding that the world

make sense of it.

And somehow—

without resolution,

without replacement—

your life continues

not smaller,

but altered.

You do not get what you wanted.

You get what remains.

And what remains

still breathes.

Wanting something badly enough never earns its place.