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Day 29 — Aromantic Identity | reflective
Lance had spent a long time thinking there was something missing.
This was the default narrative. You grew up with it — in films, in songs, in the particular urgent message of every story about finding the one, the person who would complete the picture. Love as the thing that made everything else make sense. Romance as the arrival point.
He was twenty-two years old and he had excellent friends and a flat he liked and work he found genuinely interesting and a life that felt, on most days, quite full.
He did not want what everyone else seemed to be waiting for.
He'd found the word during second year — aromantic, the specific designation of not experiencing romantic attraction. He'd sat with it for a while. He'd read about it, quietly, at the kitchen table, while Merlin made tea in the background and didn't ask what he was reading. He'd thought: this is mine, and the thought had been clear and clean and without ceremony.
He hadn't told many people. Not because it felt secret but because it felt simple — like a fact about himself that didn't require announcement. He'd told Gwen, who'd said oh, that makes sense, and Merlin, who'd said I think I understand that better than I expected to (and had then gone slightly thoughtful for about a day, which was its own thing). He'd told Freya, who'd nodded in the way she nodded at things that resonated.
Today was a fine day. An ordinary day. He had gone for a run in the morning because he liked running. He'd had coffee with Merlin and Arthur, who were insufferably settled into each other and didn't notice, which was fine. He had an afternoon free and he'd spent it reading and then walking to the river, which was doing its river things in the June light, and sitting on the bank for a while with no agenda.
He was not waiting for anything to arrive.
That was the thing that was hardest to convey to people who asked — the waiting was not in him. He was not running from it or deferring it or being self-protective. He was simply not built for it, and this was not a sadness, it was just a fact, and on most days the fact sat lightly and peacefully in him.
There were harder days. The days when the world insisted — loudly, collectively, without meaning to — that the thing he didn't feel was the most important thing there was. The days when the insistence got in, and he found himself performing the waiting, or questioning the fact. Those days were real. He didn't dismiss them.
But today he was sitting by the river, and the June air was warm, and he was full of his own life — his friendships, which were deep and real and not a consolation prize for anything; his work, which mattered to him; himself, which was a specific and knowable person who knew what he was and wasn't.
Nothing missing. Nothing missing.
He sat by the river until the light went long and amber and the evening came on. Then he walked home, and texted the group chat that he was making dinner if anyone wanted to come over, and Gwaine said already there, which meant they were already at his flat somehow, which was not a surprise.
He went home.