Learning how to love

There was a time not so long ago, where I was incapable of feeling love. I wasn’t comfortable with physical or emotional encounters, due to a number of reasons. As I met new people and encountered new stages of my life, I slowly taught myself what it was like to love and to be loved. This collection of poetry is the journey I went on in order to learn how to love.

Greatest Pain

Ever just want to feel wanted? To be able to love someone with more than just your body but every part of your mind? To have someone that you can’t help but stare at until you know every last one of their moles or dimples?

Ever wanted to feel like you’re safe purely because you’re in a person’s arms? To spend countless autumn evenings wrapped in duvets knowing that the cold will pass with the warmth of innocent kisses? To wake up in the morning with the sound of a heartbeat ticking against your ear and smile at the one you love before the day has had time to Strike?

Is it so bad to want to love and look after someone? To feel stillness in their arms and comfort in their smiles? To feel time stop so that every last second in their company can be cherished?

You wouldn’t understand unless you’ve endured loving someone so much that the feeling encompasses you every time they so much as smile or blink or breathe… And you can’t help but ask whether love itself is the greatest pain…

(This was during a time where I’d witnessed love and it had been so close to my grasp that I began to crave it)

Love through the storm

Hurting someone you love is like launching a blade in a storm. They love you and you can’t help but push them away because of your own fragility. They see you as someone you’re not, purely because you’ve given them no reason to think otherwise.

Weakness is not allowing yourself to love the person enduring their devotion to you.

Strength is holding onto one person because you know that your heart would shatter under the agony of losing them.

Strength is knowing how to be the person they need to ensure you never have to spend a single solitary second not being able to call them yours.

Strength is admitting you love someone because vulnerability is less excruciating then silence.

To be weak you deny love until heartbreak…

To be strong you must love through the storm.

(I thought I believed in love whilst I was being manipulated to believe that love was a one sided relationship of cruel words and guilt over things not in my control – an argument in ‘love’)

Paracetamol

“My head hurts”

It’s bursting with the past whilst blinding the present

“My eyes are impaired”

Burning with the agony of convulsive tears

“My chest aches”

Anguishing in the cascading waves of a million memories

“My stomach cripples”

Contorting under the weight of incessant affliction

“My legs throb”

Relentlessly racing towards the past convinced it’s the future

“My arms weaken”

Under the strain of prolonged toxicity

“My back Stings”

Under bearing the weight of malicious souvenirs

I hurt. I’m falling

apart. They ask if I want Paracetamol…

But paracetamol can’t fix

a broken heart.

(I believed I felt love once that love had gone away, before realising it was never love at all- breakup emotions lasting no longer than 3 days)

Strangers

We allow ourselves to be engulfed by vulnerability. A dangerous state of fragility that is encountered every time we are embraced by new arms or we laugh a real laugh or cry real tears. We accept that we have no power over the four words that would destroy us — knowing that they could hurt us but trusting that they won’t.

Still, there’s a pleasant fear behind the unfamiliarity of new love. Tearing away the carefully constructed safety net to reveal the childish naivety that craves security within the arms of a stranger. Being cradled until powerlessness is less excruciating than silence. Until their arms lay by their side ready to catch you and you can still feel the warmth of their body against yours. No longer a barrier between love and vulnerability or an attempt to deny the thrill of new passion.

No longer isolated strangers politely smiling at each-other on the street, But lovers,

sharing delicate kisses over duvet folds and dinner plates…

Strangers exchange glances

whilst Lovers exchange impressions

Imprinted as faithful reminders

That strangers can become lovers and lovers can become unknown.

(Having seen something incredible in a stranger, I began to realise what love was. When I began a relationship with this stranger, it was like everything had fallen into place – the feelings within a new relationship)

I understand

You don’t know yourself until you’ve loved someone else. Until you’ve seen a part of yourself in another person that you’d been blind to before. Until their pain is your pain and their smile is your happiness, only then can you understand yourself. Once you realise that you’re capable of such raw emotion and you allow yourself pure vulnerability in their arms, only then can you understand emotion. When you look into their eyes and see a future that warmly embraces you or when every song begins to have meaning, only then can you understand love. Love is looking at someone and feeling inspired, love is looking at your dimples as we laugh and feeling utterly captivated. You make me understand why I cry at the notebook and smile at old couples on the street. You make vulnerability comforting and being alone unbearable. No one knows love until they understand themselves and the intricate framework of repressed emotions.

You give me a reason to write, you give me the strength to pick up a pen, whilst before I was too scared of what I’d find unmasked.

because of you, I understand.

(Realising that the stranger is now the person who makes you whole – now understanding love)

Look up boy off the bus

I didn’t believe in love until I met the boy off the bus. He was the boy that I couldn’t help but stare at and smile, wondering what could be if he’d just look up. I’d get closer and make eye contact, as he’d make my stomach tighten and my heart drop, but still he’d look back down. I looked elsewhere from the boy who wouldn’t look up, but every part of me was captivated by what was behind his eyes, and efforts to stop thinking about him ended with the image of him engraved behind my eyes pulling me away from distraction. The first time the boy off the bus looked up made my mind race and my future look clearer, and when the boy off the bus looked back down, it was to allow me to stop wondering what could be, as I smiled from the other end of the phone. Now the boy off the bus only looks down to see our hands interlocked by matching bracelets or a good morning message from the girl who used to stare. I now smile sitting next to the boy on the bus, this time whilst sharing his headphones and as I smile, I know that I am staring at my soulmate who looks back up at me the same way I have always looked at him. And, even though I know his name, he will forever be the boy off the bus who I longed to look up.

(The story with the stranger – 11 months on and the stranger still makes me smile every day )

To anyone ever struggling to come to terms with love and what it is, to anyone who has gone through something that they believe makes them unlovable… you are loved.