bee’s mess

love makes me so scared and so lost, but also so excited and so alive!

but i’m so unstable.

i still want to run away.

i still want to go home.

but it’s just little dates.

there’s no harm in having fun.

but then my red eye, exhausted, falling apart little sister walks through the door. her usual hello gone as she retreats to her room without so much as a nod in my direction. i take a breath, wipe my eyes enough so the remainder of my sorrows is undetectable, i stand and i quietly put myself and my blanket around my little sister. she folds into me and i ask all the quiet questions, “what’s going on love?” she she falls apart and lets all the horribly heavy things tumble out into the open. while i sit and listen and offer little pieces of comfort where i can.

you were warm

curled up into my pillows

breathing softly

and you didn’t reach for me

not like you used to

i didn’t reach for you

i woke up next to you

i woke up to you waking

to your gently ringing alarm

i felt you leave my bed and tuck me back in

and i popped my head up to see you off

and settled back down as the door clicked

and it felt so normal

so familiar

a whisper of a memory or a dream i once had

i miss her

i miss her

i never thought about going back…

but what if i called?

because i miss her so much,

i spend the better half of my childhood and late teens believing love was this wonderful feeling. this sweet warmth. this beautiful soft thing. something that just feels right. i spend most of my life believing love was a feeling. an experience that ends in marriage and family and a life joined with someone. it was a fantasy of love. something i’d made up. something the world told me was real.

but i learnt something in the ending of my first long term relationship. i learnt that the kind of ideas about love that i was fed as a child felt suffocating. they trapped me. they told me the only acceptable form of love was to give myself away to someone. and as someone who has always struggled with the question of who i was as well as being incredibly independent simultaneously. i was face with a choice. do i keep letting my person be who i am or do i find someone (if anyone) who would never impose a codependent identity.

i learnt something selfish about myself. my dreams do not contain anyone else, they contain me and only me. and the relationship i was in required me to share and change those dreams. and honestly as self absorbed as it seems, i do not think you should have to compromise who you are and who you want to be for the sake of love.

i found that love can be all those soft things that i had been fantasising about, it can be that feeling. but more than anything love is an action, a choice. and to choose someone else over myself is not worth love.

so moving forward i am me, at the front of who i am is my dreams and anyone who wishes to love me must accept that they come second. and anyone who i wish to love must realise thats what i want for them also. i wish not to be their world. i wish to be a witness to their dreams and i wish for them to be a witness to mine.

i think everyone is wrong.

the choice i’m facing with, the choice i’m making feels so horrible,

and i know in every fibre of my body,