A little bit of everything

Hard to explain

05/01/2020, 19:28

I realized something today. I am 21 years old, and for almost seven years, I've thought I knew what love was. I thought that I was in love with this boy that I met when I was just a girl. I thought that I had been in love with him for years. That wasn't love; that was just me being desperate and self-conscious. I know that, and deep down I always knew that back then. But I thought that that's what love was; wanting to be with someone who wanted to be with you. Very foolish of me, I know.

After him, I thought  I was in love with guys who weren't capable of giving me what I wanted (or needed) but that I didn't realize that I wanted. I spent years saying that I didn't want to be in a relationship, and then "falling" for guys who simply weren't there to catch me. I thought that was love, because people always talk about how love is so painful and there were all these depressing songs about how much it hurts to be in love. As it turns out,  I wasn't in love, I was just trying to prove something to myself. As a song that I love by the chainsmokers goes, "It wasn't love, it was just hope". Hope that I could change these guys, hope that if I didn't, it was ok, because I wasn't ready to be in a relationship with them. And I wasn't.

Today, I am in love. I know because I have absolutely never felt this way about anyone in my life.  I have never before felt the need to see someone every single day of my life. Of wanting to tell them absolutely everything and wish that they were there to share every beautiful and ugly moment with me, because when he's happy, I'm happy, and when he's sad, I want to do anything I can to make him feel better. For the first time in my life, I am in a relationship, and I am not waiting for the inevitable end. I want to be with him for as long as I can. 

I feel like, until now, I've been living a lie. I lied to myself, I lied to my friends, I lied to this guy. I look at my ex a day like today, a guy that I thought I've been in love with since 2013... and the only thing I feel is what I've always felt and identified as love, but I can now properly name: some sort of uncertainty, a strong sexual attraction and, most of all, over anything, posession, feeling like he belongs to me, that he's my first love and forever will be. I wonder why I've spent the last few years wishing to be with him again. I wonder why all that time, I was hoping for him to remember me and want to come back to me... I don't even know that person anymore. 

I feel full. I suddenly know what love is, how it's supposed to feel, without the hurt, without the pride. Words cannot even describe how I feel every time I see him, every night that I go to bed thinking about him, or every time he does anything to make me happy. No one has ever been there for me the way that he is at every moment of every day. I can't believe how lucky I am to have found this love and I hope to never lose it. It is the first time in my life that I don't expect the ending to come. 

I am not afraid, like I was with the others, of my relationship ending. I am not afraid, as I was when I was younger, of messing this great thing up. I am finally mature enough, mentally ready, and with my heart completely open, to be in love, and I have found the perfect person to be with me for this time, and forever. I'm in love. And I have never been so sure of it in my life. 

Lesson learned. And even if I never find the words to explain exactly how I feel right now, I hope I always get to feel this way, and never have to try to remember what it was like.