A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Your Year of Closing the Gap. Something has been living in the space between what you want and what you have been willing to say out loud, and this is the year that space gets smaller. Not all at once. By degrees, the way anything that lasts actually builds. A song you keep returning to is trying to tell you something about that distance, and by spring you will finally hear what it is. Ask for the thing in April. The actual thing, not the acceptable version. Someone says yes, and the room gets easier to breathe in. By October, a relationship that has been circling its own center finally lands somewhere real, because you said the word that made it possible. The year does not wait for perfect conditions. Neither do you, not anymore.