#ironedout

When you love someone, you can feel it all the way down to your very bones. It haunts you with every breath you take—there is no way you do not know love when you feel it.

I am getting better at swallowing the bomb, at turning myself into a mangled mess without taking anyone else out in the process. There is a strange satisfaction in knowing that I am learning how to do the right thing.  But that does not make the right thing hurt any less.

It’s just, when you forget something that matters to me, I forget that you love me too.

I think the truth is, love can be easy if you just let it. We like to over complicate love when the answer is simple: you love someone until you don’t, or until the end of the world. You try your hardest and if it doesn’t work out, it’s okay to walk away. Trust that another door will open. Remember that love is the most important thing you can do. Choose them even when it gets difficult — even when they are difficult. Steal kisses in theaters. Smile. Be there for the big moments, and the small ones too, because sometimes love is two people giggling in bed sharing a chocolate bar. Sometimes love is two people just listening to each other breathe. Love is two people making the same choices, over and over, even if the rest of the world falls apart. It’s them. It will always be them, no matter what. Just what is so hard about that?

Stop. Let's pause, because this is how we have always functioned best, hovering in grey areas, navigating the sea of in-betweens, undefined. Because I have learned the hard way that anything at all is better than nothing, because I missed you and I miss you even when I am right next to you and I have a feeling I will miss you every day for the rest of my life. Because there are some people you can never shake, because you can haunt just as well as any ghost, because you have ruined me for anyone else anyway, because.

When did your brain first teach you to hate yourself? How old were you the first time you looked into the mirror and saw fault lines and flaws and failures? When did you learn to examine every pore with perfect precision, to see every strip of skin as something malleable, something erasable, something shrinkable? When did you start measuring yourself in either too much or not enough—never pretty, never beautiful, never whole? Always a work in progress; never a masterpiece. You have to aim for the moon, they said, and you listened. You listened. But where are the stars?

Some days I am the dragon; some days I am the princess. Some days I am the narrator that warns you off and tells you you would be stupid to stay. Which of them is real, then? They all are. They are all three real and alive inside of me, and so no matter which face I choose to put on that day, the other two spark a riot within. No matter what I choose to do, I am always hurting. Pain is the only constant.