Waiting Game

I’ve had the Dawson’s Creek theme song stuck in my head lately, since it's been my binge drama of choice, but not in the nostalgic, singalong way. Even if I am singing it in the shower more often than not.

It is the opening lyric to the show that keeps finding me: “I don’t wanna wait for our lives to be over.”

There are some lines that feel harmless when you first hear them. Then life happens, and suddenly they come back with teeth.

Last fall, I ended a long-term relationship with someone I loved. That's one of the harder truths to explain: Sometimes love is present, and still, the life around it no longer fits. I couldn’t see a future where I was truly happy, not because there wasn't some level of care between us, but because I had become too practiced at setting my own needs aside to keep someone else comfortable, steady, and safe.

I had been moving through my life on autopilot, calling it loyalty, calling it patience, maybe even calling it love. But some part of me knew I was disappearing.

And then someone made me feel seen.

Not rescued. Not fixed. Seen.

There’s a difference. Apparently a huge fucking difference.

To be seen when you’ve been slowly vanishing can both disorient and ground you. It can feel like waking up. It can make you realize there was a very real reason you couldn’t quite get comfortable before.

California is good for that kind of awakening. The weather helps. The distance helps. The myth helps most of all: Come west. Begin again. Become who you were always supposed to be.

But even one week in, I am seriously doubting that change works that cleanly.

Maybe healing is not a door we walk through, but a room we keep returning to. Something we are pulled back into by memory, by longing, and by the stubborn belief that something beautiful can still find us.

That's why S2, E21 of Dawson’s Creek got under my skin. The closing monologue questions the idea that people change simply because the story tells them to. Maybe our choices don’t transform us. Maybe they reveal us. Maybe love doesn’t cure us. Maybe it is evidence.

Evidence of what we want, of what we fear.

Evidence of what we're still willing to risk, even when we're tender from the last loss.

I think that is what I am sitting with now: the difference between love as a cure and love as a mirror.

We want love to arrive with answers. We want it to tell us what comes next. We want it to prove that the struggle, the pain, had meaning. That the ending was not just an ending. That the life waiting on the other side will be softer than the one we had to leave.

But love doesn’t always do that.

Sometimes, love doesn’t resolve the story. Sometimes, it complicates it.

Sometimes, it reminds us we are still capable of joy before we know where that joy belongs. Sometimes, it shows us the parts of ourselves that are still hungry for tenderness, still reaching for possibility, and still determined not to let emptiness become the final word. Sometimes, love reminds us there are things, circumstances, and choices that really are beyond our control.

And maybe that's why the theme song keeps coming back to me.

“I don’t wanna wait for our lives to be over.”

Not because I'm impatient for a perfect ending. I'm old enough to know life rarely hands us one. But because I don’t want to postpone my own becoming. I don’t want to wait until everything is certain before I admit what I want. I don’t want to make caution so sacred that I forget what it feels like to be caught up in a moment.

Maybe this place doesn’t change us as much as it exposes us.

Under all this light, there is nowhere to hide from what we want. The ocean doesn’t cure loneliness. The mountains don’t answer longing. The sunsets don’t make grief noble.

But they sure as hell make it visible. Painfully so.

And yet, maybe visibility is its own kind of mercy.

I’m not sure I know what the next part of my life is supposed to look like. I just know that I don’t want to sleepwalk through it. I can’t afford to confuse numbness with healing, and I can’t bear to become so careful that nothing can reach me.

Maybe love is change. Or maybe love is how we recognize the change we're still resisting.

Maybe it doesn’t save us. Maybe it simply shows us where we are still willing to open.

Right now, though? I feel tender and unfinished. I feel like I'm standing somewhere between an ending and what has not yet become clear.

But maybe that's a kind of change, too.

Not the movie version. Not the arc where everything resolves before the credits. Just the quieter kind. The kind where something opens in you, and even if you don’t know what to do with it yet, you refuse to close it just because the future is uncertain.

The kind where love does not become proof that you were chosen, but proof that you are still able to choose.

To want. To risk.

To begin again, even when beginning again looks nothing like you thought.

Or at least I hope so.