I closed the Kitchen

I was making dinner for the man Ive been dating the other night and I heard the sirens again.

Not real ones. The ones I carry. The ones that started the night an ambulance came for someone I loved,  someone who made staying feel like the only safe choice, and leaving feel like the reason he almost didn't survive. Because that part was true when he took a bottle of pills and I found him on the couch when I came back for my cats.

After that, I left. I was done being everything to him. I already started making myself smaller and smaller until there was no version of me left that could be someone's something without becoming their everything - and I couldn't do it anymore. 

So I closed the kitchen. I closed the wanting. 

It felt like protection. It looked like independence.

For years I called it sovereignty.

But sovereignty and shutdown are not the same thing.

There is something about desire.

The ordinary, uncomplicated kind, like wanting to cook for someone, wanting a partner, wanting to be held  that I convinced myself I had to earn back through clarity. Like I needed a guarantee it wouldn't go the way it went before.

That guarantee never came. And the desire got quieter. But it didn't go away.

What I've been sitting with lately is this: desire doesn't ask for proof. It asks for permission, and you can give it to yourself without any outside clarity.

You don't have to know how it ends to let yourself want it. You don't have to have healed every wound, resolved every pattern, finished the inner work.

What if it doesn't work out?

Do it anyway. (because this one didn’t work out) - and it hurt less because we both decided we just weren’t compatible. And I received a message from spirit about a new person coming in (or maybe someone returning…?) it confused me until we both had a moment of clarity at the same instant.

So go on the date, don’t even ask if it is one. Because requiring clarity makes you miss this window. Not just the opportunity for a relationship. The version of yourself who gets to be in one. The version who does it to learn how to receive, how to stay, how to be someone's something without disappearing - and be okay when it doesn’t work out.

That's the reclamation. Not the outcome. The willingness to want in the first place.

If this is landing somewhere tender, I have a few spots open for 1:1 cord cutting sessions. This is the work, the specific, precise kind. Where we untangle what was theirs from what is yours, so desire can breathe again.

If it's calling to you, reply and we'll find a time.