I woke up to you kissing my shoulder. And this was strange because there is usually a noticeable dearth of shoulder kisses in these situations, unless they were accompanied by an eager thrust and an urgent hand making its way to more consequential places than shoulders. But this time it was as if you’d woken, spied my shoulder and deemed it suddenly kissable.

It was just another one of those things, those crazy flings, as they say, that happened every now and then between you and me. There we were, in the same place at the same time, by happenstance. Though we both knew where to find each other—it was just a matter of how hard either of us happened to look. But this time it seemed that no one had looked, it had just happened to happen that we were on consecutive barstools with objectives that evolved similarly as drinks were slowly and civilly consumed. It had happened before, you know.

Then we went from the barstools to the street corner, hidden from the amber streetlight by a rustling tree. Then it was morning and you were kissing my shoulder in this soft, sweet way that filled me with a strange, elusive happiness that I recognized as love—and for those long moments of having my shoulder kissed by you I did fall in love with you…but only for those moments. For a hot second there, my imagination spun up a world where every morning I awoke to you kissing my shoulder, the warm morning smells of both our bodies filling my nose, the warmth of you stretched against my back and your arm around my waist. I imagined destroying my alarm clock in favor of waking up to your lips on my shoulder every single day for the rest of my life.

But the problem with all of that is that I don’t want people kissing my shoulders. Or rather, to be brutally specific about it, I don’t want to want people kissing my shoulders. And that strange happiness I felt was elusive because I knew it was false—I’d felt it before. I’m not a fucking moron; I know how these things work. Some perfectly decent man puts it to you the way you like—and that should be enough, shouldn’t it? But no, he starts kissing your shoulder and you start having delusions of matrimony. Fuck that.

I have perfected wanting. I have organized it, micromanaged wanting with such precision, I scarcely notice that I want anything. I have organized my many wants in tidy labeled bins, color coded by how possible they will be to achieve. The red ones are top-priority, life-improving, self-enriching, do-it-now, action items; the wants that are arguably philosophically existential needs. The blue ones are a little dreamier, but they are certainly in the realm of possibility, but they can be done without too. The pink ones are the stuff of deceitful imagination. Like, winning the lottery, eating brie every day and not getting fat, fucking Javier Bardem, time travel as a legitimate means of non-linear conveyance, and, of course, happening upon a partner—that elusive man willing and worthy to spend some quality time with. These are the desires that have proven, by way of fact, consequence, experience, or the laws of physics to be wholly impossible, and therefore, nothing more than indulgent figments.

So when tender shoulder kissing suddenly becomes real for a few moments, suddenly that goddamn pink box opens up like Pandora’s own and a world of wishing opens up and I fall back into it like it’s a cool pool on a hot day, submerged in delicious, fabulous hope as I see my life as it might be (though perhaps without the time travel), or might’ve been if I’d made different choices, comported myself in different ways, was, you know, someone wholly and entirely different than who I am.

That’s when I think of the red box, so full of goals and commitments and important objectives that are to be achieved in order that I may be a fulfilled individual, blah, blah, blah. I don’t have the time to travel time or fuck Javier Bardem. I don’t have time to go buy lottery tickets. I don’t have time to troll the city, the internet, the office, the world for a suitable man to be with, to say nothing of the inevitable false starts, self-delusions, and bad decisions that are inherent in such pointed searching. And I certainly don’t have time to have my shoulder tenderly kissed in the mornings. Do I?

So it is better that you and I no longer find ourselves happenstance on consecutive barstools anymore, drinking slowly and civilly, working up to that tree under the streetlight and then the morning. Because I simply do not have the time to want anything quite like you.