Before this starts, allow me to say that if I were a dog this would be so much easier. I could love unconditionally and be loved for doing so, because a pets only job (to my knowledge) is to love HARD, LOVE, LOVE LOVE...I do not envy pets (despite what you might be reading), I just have no clue how to do this.
I blocked the girl I love
as if absence were a kind of protection,
as if distance could cauterize
what proximity keeps reopening.
It looks simple from the outside.
A button. A boundary.
A clean cut where there was once
a pulse.
But inside me
love is not a home,
it is a weather system
that does not ask permission.
It enters loudly.
Everything sharpens.
My nerves learn a new language
made entirely of anticipation.
Every word I speak
begins rehearsing itself
before it reaches my mouth.
Every sentence fractures
into a thousand possible corrections
before it lands.
I am effortless with everyone else.
Casual kindness.
Unforced light.
With her,
language becomes a minefield
and I am suddenly afraid
of the very tools
I use to keep others warm.
Love sits beside me
when she leaves
and tells me I am smaller now.
That I have misplaced myself
in the effort of holding another.
It tells me
I am less articulate,
less grounded,
less whole.
And the worst part
is how convincing it sounds.
When I love,
my world reorganizes itself around one face.
My mind, which usually sends comfort outward
like muscle memory,
suddenly narrows its reach.
Others remain.
I still answer.
I still show up.
But they move to the margins
while she occupies the centre
like gravity.
I do not choose this.
It happens.
And I despise it
because love, for so many,
is spoken of as refinement,
as expansion,
as arrival.
For me it is exposure.
Everything inside me is louder.
Every insecurity gains a microphone.
Every hope becomes a risk assessment.
Nobody hears how violent
the interior gets.
Then love leaves.
And I am returned to myself
like a body remembering how to breathe.
I text freely.
I do not overthink.
I speak without flinching.
I exist without translating myself
through fear.
I become someone
easy to love.
And in that ease
I make the mistake of believing
I am ready again.
That the storm has passed
for good this time.
But love does not forget its routes.
It comes back the same way,
wearing a different face,
and I throw myself into it
with the same totality
because I do not know how
to enter anything
half alive.
I love with no emergency brake.
No contingency plan.
No quiet version.
And that terrifies me.
So I blocked her.
Not because I stopped caring,
but because caring had begun
to cost me my footing.
I have words for her
that will never be spoken.
I see something luminous
in the way she is becoming,
but I do not see it clearly enough
to claim the right to interrupt her life.
