Inevitable

I wanted it to be you. And maybe the past tense of “wanted” isn’t quite accurate, because there are still fibers of me that want you. Current tense. I feel stained, like when you accidentally wash a red shirt with your whites. I keep washing and washing, but the stain doesn’t come out. It only fades. But I know it’s there, coloring my fibers with the stain of memories and longing.

I’m not even sure what I’m longing for. It’s you but it’s also not you. I remember what your love felt like, but I also remember how terribly cold it could be. I long for your companionship but I remember that you didn’t provide much of that. When it all started to unravel, you weren’t really there at all. You were physically present but I could feel you building a fortress around yourself, brick by brick. Everywhere we went together, another brick. “Knock knock”, I pleaded, “Please let me in”. But you looked at me through that last rectangle of light and laid your last brick, shutting yourself away from me and suffocating any hope of our future.

This feeling, this longing that pulls at my chest, it’s phantom. I chase it around trying to discern what I actually want but I can never quite grasp it. Smoke between my fingers. Because it’s not you that I want. I knew this even before you told me you needed “space” to see if you still loved me. I knew it months ago. I started to grasp at smoke as soon as I felt you pulling away, because some deep part of me knew it wasn’t right between us. You were a runner, never destined to stay. Even when we were drunk in love, you cowered at the ferocity of your feelings for me. “I think I love you too much”, you told me, as you began even then, to pull away from me.

I long for the taste of vulnerability you gave me when it all started. You told me about how much you’d worked to be aware and present with your emotions. How you’d overcome your self-imposed barriers to any new experience that made you uncomfortable. How you’d purposely seek out uncomfortable situations just to challenge yourself. But all of that talk, that wasn’t the real you. You wanted to believe it was you, but you found me and left yourself unfinished. You took a couple of bricks off your fortress so that I could peer in when I stood on my tip-toes, but you never really let me in. Ironically you inspired me to expose my heart in ways I haven’t done since I was 17. I let you into a space that had been unoccupied for years. I longed for your heart to beat alongside mine, but two hearts cannot beat in sync when one is chained up in armor.

I long for you, but it’s not really you I long for. You will never be available to love with ferocity without wanting to simultaneously run away. You’ll always be a battle of head versus heart. Your head knows what you want but your heart panics in its unconscious pain and insists that everyone be held at arm’s length. You’ll never be happy inside your fortress, but that’s where you want to stay. Away from hurt but also away from love. You know you had the world with me, but you were too scared to take my hand and run with me into the unknown.

So I long, but it’s not really for you. Because I am a fighter and you’re destined to flee. We’re inevitably mismatched. You do not want to love in the same way I do. Or maybe you cannot love in that way. I’ll never know for sure. Maybe one day you’ll stop hiding and take down your fortress. I hope for your sake that you do, because life is much better out here.