I miss you in an unquantifiable way, like how someone would miss a concept, ideal, memory, void. Is it possible to miss something that you never had? Just as love is virtually negligible if never felt or known by its recipient, it’s immaterial that I might love you. And yet, I don’t allow myself to crave you. My timidity, my inferiority complex, my shame, prevent me from voicing this missing above a mere whisper. I can only muster these tentative, amorphous insinuations, buried under layers of periphrastic language, fundamentally defensive. It’s hard to be resigned to the inevitability of you fading, all the while scanning the hallways, stairwells, libraries, streets – hoping to merely catch a glimpse of you again. Anything to sustain me, to have your presence newly felt. That you’re here, that you’re real and tangible and still beautiful, still everything I both long to but wouldn’t dare touch, to even glance upon for a second too long.