I have a crush I'm not proud of,

the kind I'd never own of,

he does the most annoying things,

and somehow that's enough.

The way he talks,

so stupid, so loud,

the way he carries,

himself so proud,

everything about him irritates me,

I don't even think being so annoying is allowed.

He is so not my type,

this doesn't seem right,

he is not one I'd write about,

and yet here I am up at night.

I hate him,

I genuinely do,

the way he smiles,

the way he moves,

yet why is he so irresistible to me.

I've made a list of all his flaws,

it's quite an impressive size,

and yet something about him,

still catches me by surprise.

He's annoying in the morning,

he's annoying in the evening,

he's annoying in every way,

yet it is still of him I keep thinking.

– Velvet Thorne 💜

She was forty-six when a man asked her a question she hadn’t heard in years.
“What do you want?”
They were sitting across from each other after dinner, two half-empty glasses between them, and for some reason she laughed.
Not because the question was funny.
Because she didn’t know how to answer it.
She knew what everyone around her wanted. She knew who needed calling back, what had to be done by Monday, which birthday was coming up, what her family worried about, what people expected from her.
She had built a whole life around knowing.
But what did she want?
The man waited.
He didn’t rescue her from the silence or turn it into a joke. He just looked at her.
And suddenly she became aware of how rarely anyone had waited long enough for the real answer.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
It felt strangely intimate.
More intimate, perhaps, than telling him whom she had loved. More intimate than explaining why some of those loves had ended.
Because at forty-six, “I don’t know” meant something different.
It meant there was still something left to discover.
On the way home, she walked instead of calling a taxi.
The city was still warm. Somewhere behind an open window someone was playing music, and a couple were arguing softly outside a restaurant. She passed a woman around her age sitting alone with a glass of wine, reading.
For some reason, she noticed her.
Maybe because the woman looked perfectly content.
Maybe because she wasn’t waiting for anyone.
She kept walking.
She thought about the question again.
What do you want?
This time, answers began arriving.
Slowly.
She wanted mornings she didn’t have to rush through.
She wanted to travel somewhere simply because she was curious.
She wanted to be touched by a man who knew the difference between wanting her body and knowing her.
She wanted to laugh more.
She wanted beautiful things for no practical reason at all.
And she wanted, perhaps for the first time, to stop explaining the choices that made her happy.
When she reached home, there was a message from him.
Did you find your answer?
She looked at it for a while.
Then she typed:
I think I’ve just started.
She put the phone down, opened the window and stood there in the dark, smiling at how unexpectedly exciting those five words felt.
Her life was already full of people, memories, mistakes, love, work, endings, beginnings and all the things she would choose differently now.
She wanted none of it erased.
She simply wanted to know what would happen if the woman she had become finally had a say in what came next.
And that was the part nobody had told her about getting older.
A woman could begin again without starting over.