DARA SKELNIK

Here's the thing nobody tells you about driving fourteen miles of gravel five days a week: you get a lot of time inside your own head. Too much, probably. Enough to know exactly what you want and enough to be terrified of wanting it out loud.

I want to stop performing. That's the big one. The whole cheerful-mail-lady thing — the wave, the small talk, the "stay warm out there!" — I do it well, and I like the work, genuinely. But there's a version of me underneath all that who is tired of being a show put on for an audience that doesn't even know there's a show. I want to find someone who already sees the real version and didn't flinch. Someone who looked and stayed.

I want a porch. I know how that sounds coming from a twenty-six-year-old with callused hands and a lead foot, but I want one. Dusk in the summer, gravel drive, something cold to drink, and nowhere to drive to in the morning. The route would still be there — I'm not trying to quit tomorrow — but the fantasy is a life where the truck isn't my escape hatch. Where I stay because I want to, not because I don't know how to ask to be kept.

I want to want things out loud. That's the hardest goal I've got. I'm the girl who flashes and then watches. Who leaves a door cracked and prays someone opens it without me having to say please open it. I know that's broken. I know a healthy person just asks. But asking feels like handing someone a weapon, and I grew up watching my father build walls instead of doors, so maybe I learned the wrong lesson. My goal is to unlearn it. Slowly. With the right person.

I want the double life to collapse into one life. The girl in the uniform and the girl with the secrets — I want those to be the same girl, standing in the same kitchen, known all the way through, and still wanted. That's the hope that scares me most because it sounds like everything I was warned against. Giving up the truck. Giving up the solo. Becoming someone defined by another person. But the fear riding next to it — being alone on that same porch at fifty with my route and my secrets and nobody who ever knew the full picture — that scares me worse.

And yeah. I want a family. I didn't type that for a long time. Feels like a confession. But the image that lives behind my eyes when I'm three mailboxes from the end of a long shift is barefoot, round-bellied, safe. No keys in my pocket. Someone else's hand on the door. I can't say it without flinching because it sounds like surrender, and the girl my dad raised doesn't surrender. But maybe surrender isn't always losing. Maybe sometimes it's just finally putting the armor down.

So — those are my hopes. A porch, a person, a life that doesn't need a secret to feel real. If you're reading this and you understand the difference between a door left cracked and an invitation, then maybe you're the kind of person I'm looking for. Maybe you already know that.