Never counted on wishes (breaks a man to see what he misses)

“I wish we could stay here forever.” Of course, everyone says that their first year of university. The excitement, the freedom of being away from home, the longing for an impermanent state to be permanent - that wish is genuine, yet rarely was it quite as potent as it was for you. You didn’t know at the time just how fleeting here would be - weeks later, you would again return to your childhood bedroom, a pandemic having closed down your new barely existent friendships, never again to be as easy to maintain as they had at that dinner table when and where you had wished.

“I wish we could stay here forever,” you had said, unaware that who the ‘we’ referred to would shrink until you only had one friend remaining from that original friend group developed from the dry team orientation week 2019. You would still mean it, almost more than you had that first year, having now become acutely aware of how different here was from where you came from. 

From where you come from, university was a world of opportunity, with microscopy, lab partners, and friendships with education majors, with one fleeting friendship formed bonding over how horrible your art history professor was until you would eventually be emailed angrily by said professor, questioning if you had shared your essay with anyone. You had, and your so-called friend had plagiarized not just the artists you had chosen, but the specific works you had analyzed. You weren’t an art history major, though, and your friend was studying to become an art teacher. She lost far more than you had. She wouldn’t be here forever, or even for that final month of the semester. You would give up on minoring in art history. 

“I wish we could stay here forever.”

“We could,” your best friend, not the "friend" written about above, suggested. “I'd get a barista job here. Work at the cat cafe.” She probably could, too. A Montreal native, she was bilingual. The idea of staying forever was more realistic for her than it would ever be for you. Yet you longed for a world where the two of you wouldn't separate, where you would always be a fifteen minute walk away, where a miserable afternoon could be healed by watching cats climb and snooze while sipping hot chocolate.

“I wish we could stay here forever.” You said to the flock of geese, aware of the transient nature of their resting spot. You had learn about bird highways in North America, knew migration was natural and in fact a good reason why birdwatching was such a vital aspect of your ornithology & mammalogy class, but still - the memory of a 3pm sunset from the previous year, the only birds around being gulls and chickadees, you wished somehow your days of watching geese and a great blue heron from an overlook in the Peter Curry Marsh could last forever. That winter wouldn’t come.

Winter came, worse than before. Your brother was in trouble with the law in a way that would permanently cement your parents’ denial. You wished you had never returned home, that autumn lasted forever, that returning would reverse rather than signify a continuing passage of time. You never again would wish “we could stay here forever” because by the end of that January, the very concept of “we” was unthinkable. Repulsive. 

Being repulsed by connection didn't stop those, well, one person you had bonded with from wanting more. “I wish we could stay here forever.” They had said, meaning really “I wish we were forever. I wish you loved me back.” But all you wished for was safety. All you wished for was autumn back, before your brother and your friend had created situations that kept you alone. You needed aloneness, no more “we” or people wanting more than you could give. Maybe you would never give anyone your trust again.

 “I wish I could stay here forever,” you thought, meaning your dorm room, the library, the zen room your university residence set up, all the places where you didn’t have to see them and face the fact that someone you thought was a friend (thought was safe) wanted you. They wanted you the way they had talked about wanting to objectify someone, turn their lover into a puppet. They wanted to be loved, which was fine but you weren't going to love them. That thought had never crashed into you before now. Now all you wanted was to disappear, never be seen again, never be physically touched again. 

Nothing had happened and yet the world you once wished you could stay within forever no longer felt safe, so you yet again retreated into fictional worlds where everyone stayed the same, where the betrayals were new and fresh and not to be expected. Characters would get their wishes, their escapes would be permanent. “I wish we could stay here forever.” A character would lament, before another character found a way to stay more permanently. Then again, these characters could control weather with their emotions, shape-shift, and grow poisons from the planet with a thought. You imagined being powerful like that yet still feeling the way you did, creating scenarios why.

You should have expected danger when you returned home, yet you were caught unaware. Off guard. Home was supposed to be safe from that, from being the victim of sexual attraction, yet your brother sat next to you on the couch and took your ID card and locked himself in the bathroom with it. Half an hour felt like forever, while you stayed and waited, watched a movie with him, pretended not to see where his hands were, what he was doing with them. You wished you weren't aware this week-long break was a glimpse into forever when you moved back. You would try to deny your time at university would ever end that spring. If you pretend you're not hurtling towards a cliff, it will hurt less when you fall, you tell yourself. 

“I wish I could stay here forever.” You said it hundreds of times last semester. What you meant was “I wish I never had to go home.” You went to the Sexual Violence Support Center. You begged for help from peers, from the counseling center, from that previous place just mentioned. Again and again “can't help you” was expressed in many ways, so many times that you stopped asking. Just enjoy it while you have it, you'd think to yourself.  You searched for other ways out, but never found any, so inevitably you were dragged back to where you had left.

Wishing was pointless, you thought as the graduation ceremony dragged on and on, as your time at university ended, feeling not like a chapter ending but rather a hardcover book slamming shut. Your life wasn't over, but your world was shrinking again, no matter how many wishes to return (as you've long stopped wishing to move time backwards) you threw into the universe.