i’m sorry for being difficult to love in all the ways i never meant to be. i’m sorry for the heaviness of me, for the way small things split open inside my chest like old wounds pretending to be new again. i know some hurts should not ache this deeply, yet they do. they bloom inside me anyway, violent and consuming, until i cannot tell the difference between what is real and what my mind has built to protect itself.
my head is cruel to me sometimes. it writes stories in the dark and forces me to live inside them. it turns silence into abandonment, distance into proof, the mention of another woman into something sharp enough to bleed from. and the worst part is that i believe it. i believe it because somewhere along the line, pain became more believable to me than love ever was.
i think a part of me has always been convinced that i will never truly be chosen. that even when i am loved, i am only loved halfway. temporary, replaceable. as though i am forever standing beside the person you would rather have if they appeared at the right time.
i did not learn love gently. i was raised in the wreckage of people who could not hold themselves together, let alone a child. my father drowned himself in sadness until it swallowed the room whole, and my mother moved through life with a coldness that made affection feel conditional, distant, unreal. i think somewhere in all of that, my mind learned to survive by expecting betrayal before tenderness could ever settle in. it taught itself that hurt is safer when you see it coming.
that does not excuse the way my jealousy clings to me. it does not excuse the shutdowns, the days i disappear into myself after hearing something that should have been harmless. i know it hurts you too, and i am sorry for that more than i know how to explain. i’m sorry that my fears make me question things you may see as simple, ordinary, innocent. i’m sorry i cannot always understand your reasons, because my mind keeps searching for danger in places where maybe there is none.
but beneath all of this ugliness is not hatred, or control, or a lack of trust in you. it is fear. unbearable, aching fear. the kind that comes from loving someone so much that the thought of not being enough for them feels like drowning.
i am trying, even when it does not look graceful. even when all my healing spills out messy and sharp-edged. i am trying to believe that love does not always leave. that maybe one day my heart will stop waiting for abandonment like it is inevitable. and i hope you know that none of this comes from loving you too little.
if anything, it comes from loving you so much that losing you feels possible in every silence.