Member-only story
We Never Said It
And I Wish I Had
A unit of language, a capsule of meaning, a building block. Spoken, written, or signed, words communicate, convey, and connect. They can be precise and easy to understand or vague approximations we overanalyze. Sometimes we escape them and sometimes they escape us, we come up against a gap, a silence, a pause, a palpable absence. But this is not a story about words, it’s a story about the words between us.
We met like so many people meet today. A swipe, a match, a text. An invitation to get drinks the next day. If you’d seen us on that first date, you would have betted against us seeing each other again. You would have witnessed a stop-and-start conversation in a language he was beginning to learn and at a slow speed I struggled to stick to.
Words may have failed us, but there was something there. Unworded but undeniably alive, eager to grow, waiting to ignite and become. Drinks led to dinner, dinner led to dessert, dessert led to a dance without music in a deserted Plaza de Sol. A first kiss. A second and a tenth, a proposal to go back to his place. I smiled but hesitated. I almost did, but I walked away.
Later, we would wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t said goodbye that night. As if somehow, saying this is not a one-night stand was what opened up the question of what we could be. Did you get home…
