Loving Him
When I was sixteen, I fell in love with the idea of love and this blindly led me to someone who was not even worth a single glance never mind months of my time but he told me all the sweet things I wanted to hear and I stuck around for the false sense of validation.
Months passed and it was too late before I realized the love I was drinking from was laced with shards of selfishness and manipulation. He didn’t love me; he loved the way my naive submissiveness fed his ego. I let him in and he locked the doors and tried to repaint my once yellow walls to shades that led to me not being able to recognize my own shadow.
When I was eighteen, rebuilt and glowing once again, I promised myself I would never let my longing to be loved lead to heartbreak again. I built walls ten foot high that ran for miles and miles and kept any potential love interest at arms length, afraid to suffer again. But then I met a boy who took his time to earn my trust.
We started out as friends; exchanging messages for hours at a time and before we knew it, months had passed and although unspoken, we both thought of each other as a safe place. We shared similar dreams. Goals. Music. Perspectives. I thought I was lucky; one of those people who meet their soul mate while young. I was led to believe, after a year, that he might just be the one I marry. I was exploding with excitement and hopes for our potential. I thought I could share anything with him but when I did- when I shared the most important part of my heart he had ever come to hear, he heard me but he didn’t listen and ran for the hills.
Now, three months before my twenty first birthday, I look back on these past two heartbreaks with a scarred heart full to the brim with gratefulness. I am content and joyous because what I did not realize during these dark times is that life was preparing me for the love of my life.
The introduction of seemingly perfect matches was to show me that the person I would marry will be unlike any pre-planned criteria I had in my head and that he would cradle my heart so carefully it would make me feel re-born again. Indeed, he will not be perfect but I will love the imperfect parts of him a little extra and wrestle him to the bed with loving arms and kisses when he dwells on them. He does not have either the hair nor eyes younger me pictured but they have grown to become my favorite colors.
He loves me both selflessly and unconditionally and never expects a single kiss in return- although I do so anyway. He fills my glass before his own and insists on giving me his jacket when I am too stubborn to bring my own. He can tell when I am sad without me breathing a single word. He takes on my pain when I am struggling and goes out of his way to make me laugh and show me that he is on my team. He is gentle and patient, kind and strong willed- hilarious and crazy. But most importantly of all, he accepts me for who I am. He knows all my fears, worries, dreams, struggles, likes and dislikes and chooses to love me anyway. He remembers small details anyone else would forget.
Sometimes I look at him in complete awe and he looks back with so much love in his eyes it genuinely chokes me and I have to take a moment before talking or else I will be pushed to tears. I did not ask him to prove to me that loving again would be worth it but he took it upon himself to do so without asking permission.
To this day, he continues to go out of his way to remind me that I am more than what I have grown up to believe and because of him, I am confident what it means to love and be loved in equal measures and I can say, hand on heart, that I have never experienced such peace- like that moment when you first dive under water and everything silences; it just stops. Time escapes. Worries wash away. There is a warmth that cannot be explained. I, myself, have never been a religious person but each night before I sleep, I find myself desperately praying for as many years as possible so that I can continue loving this man exactly the way he deserves. And then I sleep, soundly, without a single worry about the next life knowing we will always make our way back to one another in the end.
