Hesitate.

An infant takes its first breath. It hasn’t killed anyone yet, or broken the last carton of eggs on Christmas morning, or left a fork in the microwave — everything smoke and ash and pain. It hasn’t looked you right in the eye, straight and clear, and broken your heart, stripped your dignity. It hasn’t, yet.

Beautiful, pure potential born before breath, alive before life. It’s the beginning: fresh, expectant, true. Don’t move. Don’t touch anything. It visits you in your dreams and hides deep underneath your fingernails, too far for any tool to dig out. It finds a home on that square inch of skin on your back that’s just out of reach. And as long as you don’t touch it, you can’t taint it. As long as it lives beyond your grasp, you believe, it might be able to live there forever.

Like an eternal piece of fruit when the first bite accelerates its decay, and you have to eat it all at once until it disappears. A tear forms behind your eyelid just thinking about it. But nothing will fall as long as you’re satisfied just salivating, as long as you keep it at a distance — like the girl and the love that she could be. But before you ever say her name, or hold out your hand to her, the sweat on your brow shifts your heart and all you can see is the ending, like a memorial of The Last Time: surgery without anesthesia.

You think your heart can learn to swim inside hope alone: no failure without risk. And not-failing is a type of satisfaction, after all — like standing in a pool without any water. Of course, you never get to swim, but at least you know you won’t drown.