If one day you choose to leave me because
It’s not easy to love people like us.
People like us didn’t grow up with love
inside us, and so for us, love is survival.
People like us grew up learning to trust survival
in us before learning to trust love in us.
It’s not easy to love people like us.
Frequent visits to the cemetery raised people like us.
We spend our holidays and birthdays visiting our loved ones
who are no longer with us in the silence of their homes.
To people like us, birthdays and holidays are just a reminder
of those we lost, and didn’t even get a chance to put up a fight.
People like us don’t stand a chance against a love fight.
We spend our day-offs around the silence of graves
because we miss our homes with their love.
We miss talking to them.
And while other people sit around tables, embroiled in
the laughter and the clicking of wine glasses.
We…are…sitting by ourselves talking to the wind,
our eyes hanging in the space and the clouds.
It’s not easy to love people like us.
And so how can you love someone who chose to
carry flowers to the cemetery rather than wearing a red
dress and walk toward you on a lover’s day?
But you see, on that same day, she fell asleep
and her eyes never saw the light again.
So how can I replace that memory with
a red dress on my body — the body that came from her,
when her own flesh returned to earth on that same day?
People like us grew up holding on to the anger
of being left alone by our parents.
Our parents leaving us on our own feels like they
chose not to take part in raising us.
And from that, we learned solitude.
People like us are hard to love, so it’s okay, leave if you must.
When our parents’ tombs closed behind us,
we walked away, and from that…
We learned. Love can be heavy and fragile.
There was not much left for us, other than the silence.
Please understand me if I don’t know how to keep us
because I only saw love from a distance, and in silence.
So I understand if you decide to leave me.
But I hope that if someday you meet people like us again,
You learn to love us the way we are.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Kateryna Hliznitsova On Unsplash
