You Can’t Compartmentalize Love

You have a beautiful way of compartmentalizing companions. You’re organized: sharp, smartly filofaxing and label-making through life. I like how meticulous you are. You honor your word: a label is a label, a promise never broken. So you rarely promise, but you always label.

Within milliseconds of a first meeting, you pull out that trusty brown box and tuck in the people you meet firmly. Inside, they land on the hard-as-bones “honesty” you use as a shield with a thud.

Then, you label that box. Those labels are meant to stick, and they usually do. Friends as Friends, family as Family, and the people you fancy as Trouble.

You label before you can be labeled — because labels are a kind of truth you want spoken into existence

It’s all an effort to be safe. We all want safety, I understand that in you. It’s safe when everything is tidy, clean. No feelings scattering across the blue like stars in the sky for you to wish upon once, then once more.

No love, no hate, just a word or an idea. A curated idea — one that doesn’t turn into action, but exists nonetheless as something static. Something unmoved by time or effort.

You honor your word: a label is a label, a promise never broken. So you rarely promise, but you always label.

Maybe your bones got tired of running after others, maybe they’re weary from being folded over and over into the boxes of others. So, in your own rebellious way, you retaliate. Box people up before they can box you in.

Dump them in the recesses of your mind, where your heart can’t even hear them anymore. And they can’t hear it, either. Safe.

The box is a dare you want denied, but wish someone would accept successfully

Not a loud Hollywood dare, not a run-through-the-airport-and-confess-everlasting-love kind of dare — although maybe it wants to be that kind of dare.

No, it’s honestly a soft dare. A soul’s truth dare to shake the cardboard backing down, to rattle and beat against the box of your limits. Tell me you’re alive and make it okay for me to breathe, too. That’s what it says.

When we met — so long ago that it barely flickers like an old bulb in an attic — you told me to get into a box, too. Not in as many words, though. You’re so used to your own boxes you don’t even notice they exist, at all.

At some point after we did what we thought we were there for, we spent time together, shared surface-level tidbits. We clicked, in the way you’re not supposed to when you’re this different. It was calm, sweet, easy. I opened that door and asked you, “Why didn’t we just go on a date?”

“Because I don’t want that,” you said, and the door clicked shut. Since then, you’ve wanted me to stay silent in the box, daring me to rattle it, anyway.

But the contents of the box are not remnants of me

The truth is, when you said you didn’t want that, you didn’t shut me into the box. When I smiled, mouthed acceptance, I didn’t let you lock me into anything. I was right back out looking for what I needed, what you couldn’t give me. You couldn’t control how I showed up because I wasn’t yours to control.

But that box was beating, and you thought it was me. And it’s been years, but every time you reach out — every time I do, too — you think I’m knocking from beyond that shallow grave. And you can’t help yourself, you must answer.

When I told you I was with someone else, you must’ve realized I wasn’t in that box, because something shifted. At first, you made a joke — you do that when you’re uncomfortable. I know this, so I volley your jokes, or I give them a soft truth to land on. Then you waited a week to ask if I’m still with the man I love. I said I am, and you retreated. You did this until I asked you to either fit a label — friend — or leave. But you don’t like being labeled like that, so you did leave — until you couldn’t anymore.

We danced this dance for a long time, and you let that rustic brown box sit, still beating. But you pay it no mind, you’re not allowing yourself to wonder what’s fluttering within.

It’s you

You already know, but let’s be clear: it’s not me in that box. I’m in a home I built from the ground up elsewhere. You know this, but part of you hopes I’m in that box, still waiting for something I never asked for.

Clipped wings still fluttering, beating against the walls you’ve built, the label you’ve glued into place — it’s you. Flapping about in the box you use as armor when love feels like a battlefield, it’s you.

Here’s the sitch, though: you should only be in a box when you’re dead.

At first, maybe you did want me to leave him. Maybe you hoped it wouldn’t last, like you think love can’t. So I could come back as I once was. An easy subscription model of sweetness on demand.

It’s safe when everything is tidy, clean. No feelings scattering across the blue like stars in the sky for you to wish upon once, then once more.

But after the months passed and I reiterated how happy I am, you didn’t. You waited with bated breath for me to answer when you asked, and when I said I was, you breathed easy.

Because my availability now, after all this time, would show up not like a pleasant surprise but as a call to action you can’t quite take. It asks something of you. Even when I never once did. Its furrowed brow, its quizzical expression…

It feels too disarming. Too much. Too real.

So now you do hope I stay with him just so you no longer need to leave your comfortable box. You’re safe in there. Nobody to tell you wash the dishes or load the dryer. Nobody to ask why you won’t just listen, why you have to do it your way.

Just you. In your double-walled, corrugated coffin.

Neither of us wanted one another — we wanted what the other represented

You didn’t want me — flesh-and-blood me — to be yours. You wanted the person who freely chose love to have chosen you, too. That maybe love smiled like you, had your eyes, and they sparkled just so when the sunlight hit them.

I didn’t want you, I wanted your freedom, too. I wanted you to grow, because growing is all I know.

I buy dying plants at half off just to revive them. Petunias like coffee water and a 10–10–10 fertilizer every week, Fuchsia years for morning and evening sun, with regular feeding and a moist, lush soil mix. Rhododendrons like a low pH, but that’s death for Geraniums.

But that box was beating, and you thought it was me.

It makes me feel like I can do anything if I can bring life to a dying thing. When my partner brings a sad-looking pot home, I nourish it and bring it back to itself. And I think I might want to do that for you, too: I wish I could bring you back to yourself.

But I know this is the self you are, so I give it the room to be. Exist. No judgment, no demands.

I don’t ask you for an inner growth you can’t muster. That would be like asking you to sprout wings when you’re a fish.

You wanted to feel as free as I, I wanted to save the one wilting away inside a box.

So when I accept you as you are, it’s not love. It’s a quiet understanding. I see you, I don’t want more, but I understand. It feels like the plush softness of a lie you tell yourself. When it’s surface-level, you bask in the warm-bath warmth of my kindness. And you’re kind, too, because I’m no longer there. I’m not probing, I’m not asking. I’m not there. Your shell is candied instead of cardboard when it feels like all I’m here for is a taste.

But it’s not my availability, not my eyes, not my softness that ask. It’s you. Part of you yearns for freedom, too, even if it’s unsafe.

You dare people to make a home in you, and you flip the script by making them realize the home is just another filing cabinet. You try not to feel what you feel. You ask what I write, but don’t ask to read it because it might make you feel. It might make me real. And my realness asks realness of you. A realness you’ve not let yourself feel. A realness you conceal with riddles, with lyrics about one thing desperately wanting to be seen as another. You want someone to look into your eyes and finally see you.

But the person you need that from isn’t me. It’s not any other “her” or some past flame you once used the box of for kindling. It’s you. You’re begging for an audience with yourself. You’re begging to be let out.

Safe is a four-letter word

There’s something so… stale, so stagnant in this safety. In these reserved references, these exchanges with yourself that toe the line but stay firmly out of our grasp. Like sprites in the bog. A glimmer of something like hope floats, then sinks right back down in the murky waters of our minds.

But the truth?

Nothing feels as dangerous to me as your box, the coffin where your feelings, dreams, hopes, and loves come to die. Nothing feels as dangerous to you as breathing my air, putting yourself out there and risking a blow that’s less coup de grâce and more like a nail peeling off a scab that hasn’t healed but hasn’t scabbed over enough to not hurt when it bleeds.

You’re gasping for breath in there, and that’s why you beat against it. That’s why your breath catches in your throat when I say something and it comes out in a soft exhale when that something doesn’t expect more of you. But it never has, even if you might have once hoped it would.

You have the box, you have the key, I wish you’d just let yourself out.

I can’t want this for you. You have to want it for yourself.

Until then, I hope you breathe. I hope your breath doesn’t catch on truths untold. And even if that box won’t let you grow, I hope it lets you rest. The way you rest when you’re with me.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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