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Every time I fall in love is worse than the last time. By worse, I mean that it feels stronger, and it hurts more when it ends. I haven’t grown used to the strength of these feelings simply by virtue of having experienced love before. I’m not an old hand at managing heartbreak simply because it’s become as familiar to me as my own face, my own shadow, or my own soul.
I’ve not made loss so close a friend that I greet it with gladness when it visits again. Nor I have made love the enemy, eschewing its presence when it happens in my life. And since I cannot make a friend out of loss or an enemy out of love, I’m bound to experience them both again.
Tell me: how am I supposed to dive into love when I know now all I risk?
I don’t think that I was ever fearless. Fear has been an ever-present companion for many years. Although maybe I was fearless once—when I was the queen of my street, running barefoot through yards and forests, diving into swimming pools, performing aerial tricks on the trampoline, daring my companions to do as much as I would dare to do. Then, I was fearless.
But I began to care, to attach, to love. I became a tightly wound ball of fear, brave on the outside and wound so tight inside that it seemed only I could feel that gut-punch in my stomach or hear the ticking in my mind. Because I cared and attached and loved, there was so much to be lost. And I did lose. A school change, another, a relocation, another. My whole life shuffled like so many cards, and I was the card that was lost while no one was looking.
Is this your card?
And how could I tell anyone what I didn’t yet understand? That I was fearless in some respects, but with a growing terror of losing anything I loved. Which began to mean that I couldn’t love. I couldn’t let “I love you” trip off my lips casually to the schoolyard boyfriend who held my hand, although I could say it to all my friends. When he said it, I quickly found the escape hatch and used it. If I could love and be loved, I could lose. And be lost.
That’s how you find yourself with someone you shouldn’t have been with in the first place, you know. You fear love but need it. When something looks like what you think love should be because they stay, you grab on, afraid to lose again and never stop losing. But you lose yourself when you do that.
Which is to say that I lost myself.
But from that loss, I grew into a stronger version of me. One that was tired of settling and tired of losing even when I thought I had assured my own safety. So I stepped back out into the world with a raw heart only just beginning to open and to trust, and I fell into eyes that I loved so much, not because of the color or the shape but because of the smile that lit them up.
I walked toward that light like the dying. I held on to it like last moments. So when I let myself love and then noticed those eyes dance away from my own rather than holding on, I knew what I had to lose. I loved anyway. I lost anyway.
Then I stopped trying. I set myself free from trying. I created a beautiful life. The pain of the love stayed in my heart and yet left my life was a weight. So I grew stronger to carry it. I grew so strong that it didn’t always feel like a weight. I even thought I had put it down. I didn’t realize I had swallowed it.
When the next love came to me, I wasn’t looking for it. I was, in fact, determined not to have it. But I fell into different eyes this time—eyes that seemed to hold me for who I am, not for who they wanted me to be. In fact, the words tripping off this lover’s tongue said the same thing. I was seen, known, accepted, desired, admired, loved as I am. Falling was inevitable, as was the hurt that would follow it when I found that I loved an illusion.
Did you know that you can love someone so much and then know that all you loved was who they pretended to be when they needed you to love them back? You peel it back and wonder if you could have loved them as they were, had they ever let you see them. You break it apart and wonder how you could have believed that anyone would accept you as you are, when no one else ever has. And if you believed because you wanted to believe, or because you needed to, or because it was true in that moment if in no other.
But you still feel love, which is to say, I still feel love.
And yet the love before didn’t evaporate because a new one showed up. The love co-existed in me, as does the weight I carry now. I’ve swallowed it, and this time I know I have because I can feel it rising in my throat in those few moments where we speak, and I know that everything is changed. We are returned to strangers, and yet all this love lodges there in my throat and stops me from speaking. Not that you could hear me now anyway.
Now I have to get stronger to carry that weight, too, because I’ll carry it a while before I can find a way to put it to rest. I think sometimes that when I put it to rest, I’ll dig a deep hole and shovel it in. I’ll cover it up and find a gravestone to mark the place. I’ll plant flowers and water it with tears that fall to grieve the loss one last time—but mostly the loss of who I was when I loved them all.
But until then, I’ll get strong. I’ll get so strong that I’ll run farther and faster than before. I’ll learn to swim, stronger and faster than before. I will grow into all that strength, and the next time love approaches, I know it will be worse. By worse, I mean stronger than anything that’s come before. Which means I have more to lose if it’s lost. I will look all that love directly in the face and hold the eyes that could break me.
Then, I’ll dive.
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This post was originally published on medium.com, and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images