Timing Really Is Everything

Imagine she is replaying every word he said while he does not even remember saying it, convinced she is annoying him while he is waiting for her to text back. She talked herself out of liking him just as he is realizing he likes her.

They were rarely in the same moment at the same time, and the quiet tragedy is wondering if they ever will be.

I think about this more than I probably should: how two people can be living the exact same story and still be entire seasons apart, not lying to each other or even hiding much, just early or late in a way neither of them can see from inside it.

She finally works up the nerve to talk about the thing she has been carrying alone, but that same week, he does not have anywhere left in him to put it. I guess nobody is at fault here, for they just knocked on the door at different hours, one of them standing there when nobody answered.

He arrives, finally, at the version of himself who wants something steady and unglamorous and worth staying for. She got there years ago and spent most of them being the only one who did, until she stopped believing it was a place people actually arrived at.

By the time she becomes someone who can be loved without flinching, he has already left, worn down somewhere around the fifth flinch before she had finished becoming.

None of this really is about who loved better or who tried harder, for it is closer to two people walking the same road with their watches set to different years.

Sometimes the gap closes anyway, where two long years finally land on the same afternoon, and it does not feel like luck so much as relief, the particular relief of realizing you had been holding something in for longer than you knew.

And sometimes the gap just stays open, which I do not think is a failure of either person, but rather just timing, completely uninterested in how badly anyone wanted it to align.

Timing really is everything, maybe not because it is kind (and sometimes not), but because it might be the only variable in any of this that was never actually ours to move.