“No, no. Don’t joke. I’m trying here, trying to be real for a minute. It’s hard to explain. It’s like when you’re listening to a favourite song and there’s this one part you love – a guitar riff or the way the singer says something. And you wait and wait, enjoying it all, but just fucking dying for that moment. And when the moment comes, it’s like you can let go and finally be happy. That’s how people – that’s how I – feel around you.”

I looked to the right of his eyes, behind him, and let things blur. It was everything at once – the only thing I ever wanted. “Thanks man. That’s really nice of you.”

From Anyone’s Ghost, August Thompson, 2025.

There is something in this passage that I recognise from my own life, although I have never quite known what to do with that recognition. I have known what it is to wait for a moment and to attach too much importance to it, and I have known the strange fear that comes with wanting to take things further. Perhaps sometimes we hold back not because we don’t want something badly enough, but because we want it so badly that we are frightened of what might happen if we reach for it. There are things that remain precious precisely because we never tested how far they might have gone.