Love is the First Blessing
Love is a sore subject for me. If you caught me at the wrong time I’d joke that I never met him. I’d laugh about it and put it out of my mind and continue on in my day in a great mood. It’s easy to pretend that things are alright when that is the only choice available.
I don’t want to be content with nothing though. Opening up my heart to possibility is — to be honest — petrifying. There are so many ways to be in love. There are so many things, so many people to love. So many paths to find it.
I’m overwhelmed, I think, by the sheer magnitude of what love could be to my life. A strength to compliment mine. Someone to lift me up, to help me remove this weight I’ve been carrying on my chest. A faith to remind me that I am built for the trials I have faced and for the blessings that I can expect to arrive. Happiness, secret smiles, a force inside myself that I can’t deny.
Love feels like too much when I’m living without it. I can convince myself that a life without love is peace. My solitude is my protection from my blessing. I can convince myself that my defenses make sense. That love only comes close in order to leave, and so like a fortress by the sea I should be out of reach and tolerant of the cold.
Love feels like too much. Too much to expect, too impossible.
I look at my life and I wonder at all of the things that I’ve let fall by the wayside. Don’t worry, I won’t harp on it here — but a girl’s gotta have a space to vent and this is it. But I wonder at what love looks like when I disappear however temporarily from a space: to the store, to bed, out into the chaotic nature hidden by the suburban sidewalks. What signs does love leave in the spaces we inhabit?
Have I given enough love to myself? They say you can’t be properly loved until you know self-love. I’m only just beginning to see how overflowing self-love can be. Right now I’ve been feeling reduced, soaking up everything I hear and see like a child. I feel like I’m relearning everything again, and not every habit I’m relearning is necessarily a good one.
I’ve been learning to keep myself a secret. Listening to the subtleties of body language, hearing the quiet between the statements others speak, and wondering where in their own pauses I can hide myself. Writing that out now, it sounds like I’m accepting the bare minimum as the ceiling to my life.
I don’t like that, lemme try again.
I’ve been learning to keep myself a secret. Like a mystic jealously guarding her strange discoveries from unworthy eyes, I am eyeing every beam of light through my window with cautious optimism, as though the sun might bring news of a possibility — a love — that excites me as much as my abstract curiosities do. Cautious optimism as much as suspicion, what the light brings must be taken with a grain of salt, only a spell in it can quickly cause burns.
That’s blocking my blessing though isn’t it.
Instead, I’ll imagine. Something in me feels like imagining even one good potential will make it easier to open my heart to possibilities I can’t yet see. To the possibility that only good can come to me now. That I will be safe. That I will be warm and loved and understood. That I will have purpose and that I will be able to follow my path and go where I feel called.
That I will have the chance to truly heal and be my highest self.
I’ll close my eyes and imagine. Being my full self in nature, by waterfalls, in fields of wildflower and clover, in echoing canyons with others who are just as excited for adventure as I am. Seeing new things, experiencing new foods and new cultures — the colors and designs, the artwork and religious iconography we might come in contact with, I can see all of it coming to me.
It’s so easy to fall into negative speech. It’s too easy for me to qualify my future love, with life, with lovers, with the road I’ve chosen to take.
But I won’t again, at least not here.
It’s enough to say… love is a sore subject for me, but secretly I’m excited to be indulgent and ecstatic in love again.
