Lovesick

Photo by Ashlyn Ciara on Unsplash

Love is supposed to be freeing, or that’s what I grew up wishing.

Love is not supposed to bind you, and suffocate you. Love shouldn’t take but give instead. Love feels like love when it’s got its arms wide open. Love doesn’t control, but encourages. Love finds you a place called home filled with butterflies and bubbles that has you giggling with laughter and showered with kisses.

But love can also turn dark. It can hold you in a strangle and choke out the freedom you very carefully chose to build. Love can turn into a control freak with no intention of reasoning. Love can drown you in a pool of guilt with the sweetest of words. When people deprive you in the name of love, belittle that growing heart of yours, and taunt you sick, I question if they even know the meaning of love.

I often sit to wonder why I swallow words of deprecation in a hurry, eager to lessen the anger of others by holding it at the back of my throat. I don’t like confrontations so this is a pill that refuses to go down. My mind shuts down and I choke up, unable to frame a single sentence of respite.

I can’t digest the false accusations thrown at me day and night so I spit them back out onto paper, my pen furiously scribbling everything I couldn’t say out loud.

While I have found the romantic love of my dreams, it seems like love from other places turn dark.

I disappeared from writing recently. Found myself in the depths of not knowing who I was or what I was doing. But it’s articles like this that help you get back to trying to figure it all out. Check it out:

Where are you going in your Life and do you feel lost?

✍ — Published by Libby Shively McAvoy at Dancing Elephants Press. Click here for submission guidelines.