This is about a silent dream i have: the quiet deal I’ve made with myself that reaching this dream will cure me, fix the part of me that has struggled with staying alive. If that’s not somewhere you want to go right now, feel free to skip this one.

I don't know if ' moving target' literally means go on a run either way I'm already on that wave. My interpretation is different: To me it means you need something to run toward. Not just motion for motion's sake. A end-goal. Which brings me to my reason to be a moving target; the dream I've never said out loud.

Not because I don’t know what it is. I know exactly what it is. I know it the way you know your own name, the way you know which way your bedroom door swings. I have wireframes for it. I have lists. I have lists about the lists. This dream is so well planned.

And yet.

i never talk about it because the downside of these big dreams is: you can spend so much time dreaming about your dream life that the dreaming becomes the life. That the years quietly pass you by while you’re upstairs in your own head, decorating a future you haven’t started building. You build the whole thing in there set the ambience, the mornings, the version of you who finally did it and it feels so real and so close that you forget to check whether your hands have done anything today besides scroll and sketch and imagine. Meanwhile the actual, only life you get is happening , without you. that is my biggest fear dreaming so much and never getting there; failing myself.

Here's the part I don't usually say: I've fully convinced myself that if I get to live this dream, I'll be cured. Not better. Cured. Like whatever has made me someone who has had to fight to stay alive will just … stop, once I'm standing inside the life I've been sketching for years. I know that's a tidy story. I know real recovery doesn't hand out lump sums like that. But it's the story I tell myself on the nights the wanting to live and the not-wanting-to-be-alive are both sitting in the same chest, because it gives the wanting-to-be-alive something specific to hold onto. A destination instead of just an instruction.

So instead I keep this dream close. I don't talk about it. Not to be mysterious I promise this isn't a mysterious-girl bit but because I believe in jinxing. Fully, embarrassingly, unscientifically. Say the dream too early, too loud, to the wrong person, and you've handed it something to shrink under. I've watched it happen to other people's dreams. Spoken into a room too soon, and suddenly it's smaller, borrowed, everyone's opinion sitting on top of it instead of just mine.

So I don’t say it. I just build toward it quietly, like I’m laying track in the dark.

But I think about the day it happens the day I actually get there, whatever there ends up looking like. And when I imagine it, it’s never a soft feeling. It’s not a gentle exhale. It’s the kind of moment that only makes sense in the language of the characters who’ve felt it before me.

It’s Eren finally standing at the edge of everything he was told didn’t exist, watching the ocean move like it has nowhere else to be, and the only word left in him is freedom.

It’s Robin, after a lifetime of being told the world had no room for her, choosing out loud, in front of the people who came back for her to say I want to live.

That’s the size of it. That’s what’s waiting on the other side of all this planning. Not a checklist completed. A whole different way of being allowed to exist.

I don’t actually think the dream will cure me. Not really, not in the daylight version of my thinking. But I think it might give me a reason to stay long enough to find out what would. And maybe that’s not nothing. Maybe a destination you can walk toward is exactly what you need on the days the wanting-to-live needs something to point at.

I don’t know when I’ll say the dream out loud. But I know what it’ll sound like when I finally get to live it quiet at first, and then loud, like an ocean, like a girl who decided she wanted to live after all.

In conclusion because apparently I need one I’m grateful I have a dream to hold onto. Without it, I think the thoughts would win. I’m still afraid that reaching it won’t cure me, that I’ll get there and find the same tired me waiting on the other side. But maybe that’s not actually the point of it. Maybe it doesn’t have to cure me. It just has to be the reason I keep going.

“Depression can’t hit a moving target”. So I guess I have to keep moving.

thank you for reading<3

There is a specific kind of ache that doesn’t have a clean name. It’s not heartbreak nothing has been lost. It’s quieter than that. A feeling I’ve chosen not to act on, sitting with it, letting it exist and somehow that stillness becomes its own kind of devotion.

We treat yearning like a problem to be solved. The cultural script is always do something. Tell him. Shoot your shot. As if the feeling only has value if it leads somewhere.

But I don’t think that’s true.

something that happens when I want something deeply and choose consciously or not to just let it be. I build a muscle. A tolerance for the gap between desire and fulfillment that most people spend their whole lives trying to close as fast as possible. Yearning, when I stop fighting it, teaches me that I can feel something enormous and not be destroyed by it. That want doesn’t have to become action to be real. That I can carry something heavy and still move through my day completely fine, and that itself is a kind of grace.

My heart is doing something right now that my hands are not involved in. That’s the only way I know how to describe it.

There’s a seriousness to his face that reads as quietly, effortlessly manly and then his eyes do something completely different. They’re soft in a way that makes me want to hold him and also makes me wonder if he’d let me. That contradiction is doing something to me that I haven’t fully sorted out yet.

There’s a feeling, and there is a very deliberate stillness on my part. Not because I’m suppressing anything. Not because I’m playing a game. But because some feelings are worth sitting inside for a while before you go crashing through them.

The ache is real. I won’t pretend it isn’t. Some days it sits in my chest like a stone. I pick up my phone and scroll back through his texts looking for something a confession, a crack in the surface, some small proof that I am necessary to him in the way he has quietly become necessary to me. I parse punctuation. I read tone into response times. I am essentially a detective investigating a feeling that may or may not be mutual and the evidence is, at best, circumstantial.

Our last time together ended with no hug. And I have thought about that more than I would like to admit. Was that shyness? Was that him creating distance on purpose? Was it nothing just a goodbye that didn’t mean anything either way? I don’t know. I genuinely do not know. And yet I sit with it. I still yearn. Which feels, on certain days, absolutely absurd.

Siri, play Bad Religion.

nobody warns you that yearning can feel so unnecessary. So embarrassingly unproductive. I don’t even know if he likes me. I have no confirmation, no green light, no moment I can point to and say there, that’s when I knew it was real. I’m just feeling something enormous in the direction of a person who may or may not be feeling anything back.

And somehow I keep going. I check my phone. I sit with the not knowing. I don’t reach.

I think yearning builds something in me that instant gratification simply cannot. When everything is available immediately text back, slide in, make it known I never have to sit with want long enough to understand it. I never have to ask myself why him, why this feeling, what is it about him that has settled so quietly into my chest. I’d just act, and the question would dissolve before I ever really answered it.

But yearning forces the question to stay open. And open questions teach me about myself in ways that answered ones never do.

There’s something sacred about caring for someone from a distance without requiring anything from them in return. No reciprocation, no acknowledgment, no drama. Just a private, quiet thing that belongs entirely to me. I’m not projecting a fantasy, I’m not performing for him. I’m just aware of him in a way that costs me something, asking for nothing back.

That’s not weakness. That’s an enormous amount of emotional discipline dressed up as stillness.

Wanting softly is not the same as wanting less. If anything it’s wanting more, more carefully, more honestly, more patiently than the world usually makes space for. It’s choosing to feel something fully without immediately trying to resolve it. Without reaching.

I don’t know how this particular ache ends. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe that’s fine. What I know is that it hasn’t broken me and every day that it doesn’t, I become slightly more convinced that I can hold more than I thought. That I have more capacity for feeling than I’ve ever been asked to use.

Yearning, it turns out, is not the opposite of having.

It’s just a slower, quieter way of being full.

Sit with it. Don’t rush it. Let it mean something.