The Seduction of Unavailability

There is a particular kind of person who can make a waiting room feel like somewhere you chose to be.

You are in a queue, or a car, or trapped in a conversation you have had approximately nine hundred times before, and normally it would be exactly what it is: a queue, a car, a conversation. Time passing. The administrative paperwork of being alive.

But 'they' are there.

Or they might be there soon.

Or they texted you an hour ago and, for reasons apparently beyond the jurisdiction of modern science, you are still living inside it.

Suddenly the queue is interesting. The car becomes somewhere you don't particularly want to leave. The same conversation you've had nine hundred times develops texture. You are technically still participating, nodding at appropriate intervals like a functioning member of society, but spiritually you have left the premises.

Half of you is here.

The other half is somewhere between you and this person who has not, if we're conducting an honest audit, actually given you that much to go on.

This is the part you notice later.

When the charge has dropped enough for you to look at the situationn with something resembling objectivity. When your frontal lobe has returned from annual leave and is requesting access to the accounts.

Because once you actually look at the evidence, an inconvenient fact appears.

They haven't promised you anything.

They haven't actually done very much.

And yet somehow you have handed them the keys to the quality of your own existence.

A Tuesday with them nearby is better than a Saturday without them.

Not because Tuesdays have undergone some magnificent rebrand.

Tuesday remains Tuesday. A deeply unserious day with no natural charisma whatsoever.

Something in you has changed.

And I think this is where the story usually begins. With a Tuesday. A supermarket. A waiting room.

Some completely ordinary piece of human existence made briefly infinite by the proximity of someone who not only did not consent to participate, but remains entirely unaware they have been cast in a leading role in an elaborate theatrical ballet of desire for which you are apparently writer, director, choreographer, and sole audience member...

The question worth asking - later, obviously, not while we're enjoying ourselves - is what exactly they are doing.

And whether they are doing it to you at all.

Or whether you were always capable of making the world feel like this, and simply needed somewhere to put it.

Consider what they have actually given you

Not what their presence produced in you. What did they themselves contribute?

A handful of conversations. A few moments of intensity that felt suspiciously like proof of something. Attention delivered at sufficiently irregular intervals that each new appearance was received like correspondence from the Western Front.

This is not nothing.

But it is also, if we're being precise, not very much.

The architecture of what you feel has largely been constructed by you, using materials they supplied occasionally and perhaps without any particular intention.

You built the cathedral.

They dropped off three bricks and a suspiciously meaningful look.

And now you're standing beneath the stained glass crediting them with the architecture.

There is something ethereally creative about this.

You construct them in the spaces they leave.

The version of them that exists between appearances is partly them and partly you: an extremely ambitious collaborative project they did not agree to participate in and may be completely unaware is underway.

You write them into the gaps.

And unfortunately, the writing is excellent.

The version you carry is vivid. Specific. Compelling. Every unfinished sentence contains possibility. Every silence can still mean something. Nothing has been resolved enough to become ordinary.

Whether this person you've constructed is accurate is another question entirely.

A deeply inconvenient question.

We will circle back.

Why does this specific feeling make you feel so alive?

Because uncertainty leaves room for imagination.

And imagination is an absolutely unhinged interior designer.

Give it one emotionally charged conversation, two prolonged looks and an ambiguous text message and it will furnish an entire penthouse.

Availability doesn't leave nearly as much floor space.

Fully available love has a strange quality when you aren't accustomed to it: it is already there when you arrive.

You don't have to summon it.

You don't have to decode it.

You don't have to perform emotional forensic analysis on a four-word text message at 11:43pm.

There is no gap between what is being offered and what you hoped was being offered for your imagination to fill with possibility.

This is, objectively, everything love is supposed to be.

And yet.

That fullness can initially feel almost featureless.

Like a landscape without shadows.

Beautiful, certainly. Peaceful. Safe.

But shadows create depth.

And the unavailable person?

Oh, they have shadows.

Warehouses of them.

Industrial quantities.

Enough chiaroscuro to keep Renaissance painters employed for several centuries.

That is part of what makes them so difficult to leave.

What unavailability gives you

Possibility.

Not necessarily a relationship. Not necessarily intimacy. Sometimes not even particularly impressive behaviour.

Possibility.

And possibility has one enormous advantage over reality:

Reality eventually has to become specific.

A real person has annoying habits. They misunderstand you. They get tired. They say the wrong thing. They become predictable. You eventually discover what they meant.

Possibility never has to suffer this indignity.

It remains pristine.

The unavailable person can therefore occupy a strange psychological position. Real enough to produce genuine feeling, absent enough that the feeling never has to fully confront reality.

And this is where I think we sometimes make the wrong conclusion.

We assume the intensity means the person must be extraordinary.

Maybe they are.

But intensity is not only information about them.

It is information about you.

The feeling isn't wrong.

It isn't automatically evidence of damage, poor judgement, attachment pathology, daddy issues, Mercury retrograde, or whatever diagnosis chatGPT has issued this week.

It is evidence of a capacity.

The ability to be moved this deeply by another person. To have the quality of an entire Tuesday rearranged by one message, to construct something vivid and alive in the space between encounter, is an enormous amount of emotional and imaginative energy.

The unavailable person did not necessarily create it.

They revealed where it was hiding.

And perhaps that is the more interesting question.

Not: How do I stop feeling this?

But

What else could this part of me make infinite?

Where else could that intensity live?

What could it build if it were given somewhere else to land?

Because the Tuesday is still a Tuesday.

The queue is still the queue.

Nothing about the physical circumstances changed.

And nothing about what you felt was ever less than real.

But the person who made the ordinary world briefly infinite was not actually making it infinite.

You were.

They were simply standing nearby when you remembered that you could.

And that may ultimately be the most valuable thing they ever gave you.

Three bricks.

A suspiciously meaningful look.

And the accidental discovery that apparently you know how to build cathedrals.