Your needs, my wants, and the in-between where we meet

Celina Bagchi '24

Your needs, my wants, and the in between where we meet

Who am I becoming? I wonder.

I see your smile in streetlights and

Storefront window reflections and

Strangers’ gazes skating across my

Blushing cheeks.

All I want

Is to be what you want, to be

Enough for your happiness, to be

Something you could love, even though I

Wouldn’t love me either.

I loved you in the way where

Each time our hearts collided, a

Piece of mine broke and cemented itself in your soul

Slowly

Losing me to you.

I heard once that soulmates are a story made up by some old man desperate to be less alone in a sad and tired world. They told me two souls don’t fit together like pieces of a puzzle, like coffee on rainy days or stars in a cloudless sky or kissing my blushed cheeks. They told me love is a figment of the world’s collective imagination and we’re just trying to be parts of a whole puzzle when really we are each our own jigsaws and I—

I wonder if I have made it yet.

I wonder if I will ever make it into your world.

I do not belong there, but somehow there is nothing I want more

Than to look at warm honey brown eyes and know they are mine.

And you need me,

But not the way that I need you—

And I think maybe that’s what breaks me most of all.