An Open Letter to You — On Falling in Love
I don’t know where to begin.
It feels like an intimate journal entry, really, I’m embarrassed and cautious to share or publish under the assumption that someone will give a shit and read and relate. No one ever really relates. That’s not meant to be as alienating as it seems.
What I mean to say is that falling in love isn’t what we’ve been sold. Love can’t exist as a commodity — it dies, it withers, it wilts and screams.
It is mine and yours and together we can fuck it up or flourish. At the risk of echoing that one verse from Corinthians I bothered to read, love is malleable and wretched and tireless and imperfect and frustrating. There is no one True Love. Love isn’t essentialist. My love for you isn’t essential — that kind of love is reserved for me. I’m not going to apologize for conceding to my selfishness.
We live and we learn and that’s all there is to it. We create meaning for ourselves; I create meaning for myself. I will not be told and sold that there is only one person out there for me. I’d suffocate under the weight of an elusive fate.
You, who until recently I believed to be the love of my life, told me;
“I guess that’s what love is, a sort of terrifying beauty where you either take the leap and find all that you so desperately craved in another, or plunge down into another misadventure that changes who you are to the very core.”
My love, I vehemently disagree. Pieces of you lead me to discover myself and still it was messy and it fucking hurt. It’s not either/or. It’s all of the above. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t work.
Love is real, whether or not I’m basking in the warmth of self-acceptance or scrambling to re-arrange the components of my life to retaliate against that fucking curve-ball that you’ve thrown at me. Too bad you planned for me to strike the fuck out.
And yet, I’m still here. Love remains, intense as ever and demanding to be channeled.
Why am I so embarrassed? Why am I so ashamed to admit that my heart may not belong to me but would rather eagerly abandon me for an empty hope of finding another that can make it whole?
I’m telling you, I am whole, now. The crevices widened by self-hate are better filled with self-love instead of being reliant on an ideologically bartered elixir that can so quickly evaporate at the faintest sign of a self-inflicted drought.
From here until forever,
“My alone feels so good. I will only have you if you are sweeter than my solitude.” — Warsan Shire
Self-love replenishes, an ever flowing spring that gifts youth and clever thoughts and laughter and confidence.
Though it would be nice to find that in another, to taste from a well that is exotic and foreign.
Fine, fine, but it’s not my own. It doesn’t belong to me. You don’t belong to me. I barely belong to myself.
I’ll get there, tho. I will.
