Reached for: Tomato (S)

The red fruit long called the love apple is fitting here: appetite drawn again and again to whatever looks like love and keeps stopping short of it. It forms with a mother whose warmth arrived and withdrew on no schedule, teaching a child that hope is the currency and arrival is not part of the arrangement. What it asks for is the plainer test of whether steady affection can be tolerated at all.

I fall for the almost. Whoever nearly loves me has my whole attention.

Majnun, driven out of himself by a love always held one distance away, whose devotion is fed entirely by the absence of the beloved. The task is to see the longing as the thing being served.