fall's for yearning

I'm a lovers girl; get over it

There’s a note on my phone that contains a bunch of one-liners, poetry-esque pieces and essay titles, that I routinely go back on to when it’s 2:14am on a Sunday and my pre-sleep scenarios are nothing but re-runs of convos with strangers I had months ago. As soon as the leaves start to fall and Amsterdam turns into this haze of orange and reds, I can’t help but notice all the love and heartbreak that’s happening around me. It usually ends up in a vague, barely-rhymed phrase in my notes app that I occasionally turn into a poetry piece or completely forget about.

The notes in my phone are my journal in disguise, filled with fragments like “she counts her days not in years but in loves; in hearts broken and healed in desires and lust” - words that mean nothing for someone else and hold a lifetime of yearning for me.

And there’s no better season for it: autumn is the time for yearning.

Yearning is the feeling of intense longing for something. When I yearn, I yearn for my past, future and present. For long-lost connections and might-have-beens. For friendships that moved away and paths not chosen. There are few moments in a year where I feel like connection is not only craved but seems essentially needed. This week has been one of them.

After a few too many glasses of red wine and repeating the phrase “but that’s so fair darling” one too many times to my semi-heartbroken friend, I’ve come to realise that we’ve lost the art of yearning. We don’t yearn, we jump. We search for instant gratification, for immediate swipe-ups on our stories and for a short-lived connection to be anything but that. Yearning is slow eye contact in a crowded room, messy conversations in the dark of night, singing songs in the car and smiling at your phone in the comfort of your bed.

I am, naturally, a huge romantic. I fall fast and hard, while I’m at the same time rarely ever looking for a connection to last past its 3-month mark. For me, it’s more about the initial yearning part than the actual connection that comes from it (yeah, let’s not get into that one right now). So when I thought about yearning this week, I thought about the time I had my first real (and gay, go me!!) kiss in my garden shed with my best friend at the time. Or when I spent one rainy night driving through the empty backroads of the Midwest, harmonizing to songs that’ll always remind me of the night we met. When I spent a whole night sitting by the water and watching hundreds of shooting stars off the Sardinian coastline. The hours smoking cigarettes on windowsills and writing about the city I was gonna fall in love with. Making out in the depths of the ocean so no one would see. Holding hands in the back of Ubers. Hearing a song about how much I broke their heart on stage for the first time. Spilled glasses of wine on the marble floor and watching Gossip Girl in a penthouse overlooking the city.

It’s these glimpses of connection that I hold onto, that I yearn for. I rarely remember the days where romance faded afterwards, who left who on read or if they secretly miss me from hundreds of miles away. I think of the connection that existed in that very moment; when you forget the world around you exists; when there’s nothing better to do but imagine yourself in that version of life.

So, as I recently told my friend: a connection always goes both ways, it can be meaningful no matter the timeframe, and sometimes it’s just that: a moment spent yearning over a glass of red wine.