I had plans to write just this one line.
I stayed, I tried and I fucking love you…god knows I do.
The end.
But, there is always a ‘but’.
When she sent me over to your page to read ‘pretty damned sure this is about you Sarah’ and I found myself blocked, for the first time in 2 years, I knew beyond doubt and question that you loved me.
Not because of what you wrote, because you blocked me.
And honey, that is really fucking fucked up.
“If you love me, then love me.” Stephen King
Why is this hard?
What you wrote was glorious, and all of the things most women dream of hearing.
I am not most women. Nothing compared to hearing you whisper “you fucker” in my ear, that I gave you an ‘emotional boner’ or sighing when I said something that pleased you. That was the real you talking to the real me, that was us. That laugh when you’d call me a clever girl, like diamonds, but more precious.
I asked you out for coffee, 2 years ago tomorrow.
I remember the dancing dots, my hopes soaring that you might actually say yes.
You spent 20 minutes hunting through my profile pictures and found exactly what you were looking for, a reason to say no, a nipple.
You decided in that moment I was exactly like all the rest, an attention whore/exhibitionist who would do anything for social media likes.
You told me to fuck off.
You never asked me why I put it up. For the record, it was a show of solidarity for a female friend who had been put in Facebook jail over a nipple. Nothing more.
There was nothing to forgive. You were protecting yourself, I saw it. I understand. I feel protective over you too, viciously so, even in absentia I would allow no one to speak badly of you.
Even now, I still defend you. I always will. It’s my way.
The exact same amount of time you spent looking for reasons this would never work and making assumptions about me, I spent learning you. Gleaning why you are the way you are and trying to figure out ways to prove I loved you with the parameters given.
And lordy-fucking-lord there were a lot of parameters. I could barely move an inch without hitting a wall.
I think I realized, the third or fourth time you came back, that if you stayed, life as I knew it would be over. And I didn’t mind. I called you my life’s work and I meant it.
“…my love for you is so overpowering I’m afraid I will disappear.” Paul Simon
I wasn’t afraid.
I knew that once I laid eyes on you the rest of the world would fall away. And once you saw into mine you would trust me. My face would forever reflect that fact that I belonged to you alone. My body and mouth would back that up in their respective languages. I am yours, nothing more.
And I wasn’t afraid.
I started out being afraid of you. In awe. I chuckle to myself when I think back to my first idea of what and how you were. Some of it astute and the rest so far off.
I imagined you in a small apartment above a bodega. A desk overflowing with poetry and balled up pieces of paper, a few whiskey bottles and full ashtrays. A small iron balcony on which you would sit, smoke and drink your morning coffee or afternoon whiskey and just observe.
Pounding at the keyboard, trying to diffuse some love back into the world, one drop of your heart’s blood at a time.
Every time I bought a book or a piece of your work I thought I was helping you in some small way. Funny in retrospect, but it is the thought that counts.
Poor and lost and lovely to me. And I loved you, as is, or as I imagined. I still do.
When I realized how wrong I was, I just chuckled to myself and gleaned an even further understanding as to why those walls of yours are so damned high.
I wish I could remember the exact moment that I realized you were human. Flesh, blood and marrow. Fallible and fumbling, just like me. It was a good moment. I fell harder for you and became braver than I have ever been.
When you told me about your life I absorbed every word, every tone in your voice that said ‘this is what made me’. I learned you, even when you left, I kept studying our conversations. I wanted to be better at loving you. You were worth it.
You taught me I wasn’t worth it, to you.
Your safety is more important than the risk it was to just love me and see where it goes.
I understand, your safety is important to me too.
That is why 5 people know your name…and no one knows the secrets you told me in the dark.
I wouldn’t trade a minute of you.
Since last July I have had plane ticket money tucked away in a drawer, waiting for you to call me to you. But you never did.
You opened up a whole new world of possibilities as to how honest I can be with those around me about who and what I am, the things I want and the things I have done. You made me admit things out loud that I had hidden even from myself. You unlocked the cage society made for me and set me free. And I know you loved me for it.
So I will always love you. I had to flip the switch from active to passive. And now back again, there is nothing unlovable about you to me.
I am writing this to you, in blood red, dripping graffiti on one of the walls you threw up to block me with. And that is the best I can do, in the parameters given.
