I want a boyfriend - Sherry Ning

It’s not just the wanting but the waiting, the long pull of days that stack upon one another like the dull, sweating hours of summer afternoons when the cicadas scream out their endless lament and the trees stand perfectly still in the heat, heavy with the weight of their own shadows. It’s in the knowing that the day will stretch on regardless, like gray ocean waves too sluggish to break into foam, with or without the company of someone who might sit beside me in the quiet of it all, who might lean back against the same bench and look out at the same parkscape and say something—anything—that would make the unbearably vast openness of the day feel less like a mystery and more like a ritual. It’s not loneliness, not exactly, not the kind that rips or rages or tears but the kind that settles, humid and low, into the bones, so that you do not even notice it until one day you find yourself sitting alone at a patio and someone who looks your age asks, “Excuse me, may I take this chair?” befo

It’s not just the wanting but the waiting, the long pull of days that stack upon one another like the dull, sweating hours of summer afternoons when the cicadas scream out their endless lament and the trees stand perfectly still in the heat, heavy with the weight of their own shadows. It’s in the knowing that the day will stretch on regardless, like gray ocean waves too sluggish to break into foam, with or without the company of someone who might sit beside me in the quiet of it all, who might lean back against the same bench and look out at the same parkscape and say something—anything—that w