The Wanting

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Normal is such an impossible word, isn’t it?
Like trying to hold water in a sieve
and then blaming your own hands
for the flood that comes anyway.

When I was younger—
and that youth was not golden, mind you,
but feral, wiry, all angles and longing—
I worshipped at the altar of Normal.
As if it were something to be earned.
A badge. A prize. A sentence.

I made it a game:
the right smile, the timed laugh,
the mathematics of eye contact.
Normal was always
ten steps ahead, and I
ran in its wake like a dog
that doesn’t know it has teeth.

Meanwhile, another version of me—
you know the one—
slipped quietly into the fantasy lands.
The other girl, the secret self,
barefoot in some imagined ruin,
reading books that no one assigned,
kissing no one, but learning how it might feel
if she did.

There, the rules bent toward meaning.
People said what they meant,
or didn’t speak at all.
Even the silence was holy.

The fantasy lands were wildly innocent—
not pure, never that—but untouched
by the filth of pretending.
It was not escape.
It was rehearsal.
Not for what I was—
but for what I could be
if I ever stopped apologizing.

Back in the other world,
I smiled so hard I cracked.
The air smelled of plastic and performance.
And still I returned,
because there is a violence in wanting
what is outside the script.

But my god, I wanted it.
I wanted to unlearn the rituals,
to discard the armor,
to stop splitting myself
into the one who performed
and the one who watched.

Desire bloomed in the chest like fever.
It made the hands shake,
it made the rooms seem too small.
Everything—every hallway, every silence,
every turned back—
became a door.

And I,
a body too full of wanting,
tried them all.