I Never Let You Know How Ready I Was To Love You

You pass by me for the first time this year and my heart shatters into microscopic shards like kitchen glassware against the granite island countertop. But you’ve never been inside my kitchen and you are not my home.

You don’t witness when the light in my bedroom window dims and I lay under the covers, letting dreams haunt me once more with a future you and I will never have. You don’t hear the pellets from shower water caressing my collarbone, as if scorching water will actually warm my chronically chilled bones. You don’t see the way I brew coffee—always too much, leaving the cup half full for the sink to finish. And you didn’t hold me on this year’s icy New Year’s night when I was shivering inside my best friend’s car into another year alone.

How can a human being whom I’ve never imagined, whom I at one point would have definitely canceled without a second chance, and who shouldn’t have meant so much ended up crashing his existence past my guards? The doors of my Eden unlatched. Yet it remains unscathed, perfectly intact, because I never let you know. I never let you know how much I was ready to love you.

But how could I? You have a home with someone waiting inside for you to return to and I am just a young girl whose gaze you fight to hold. Are you in pain, too? Oh, I know I shouldn’t care. I know I shouldn’t hope. I know I can’t do that to her. I can’t do that to you, even though I fold into paper airplanes at night, soaked in tears, letting that heaviness bend my wings from flight.

So, I beg you, please love her well. Love her every day without qualms, without a thought of me. Because hell, had I had a heart less than gold, I wouldn’t be waging this war against my own home, my own hearth, my own happiness. But even young girls learn early on that loving often means letting go, that someone else’s grief won’t breed another’s love, another’s happiness, or another’s peace. And I guess sometimes very little can be said about the human heart — it’s untimely, ruthless, moral-free, but unquestionably full of hope. So here I stand with hands clutched onto the last shred of honor I have, as always on my own. I part ways with you—another almost—accepting that I will have to nurse my heart of hope with sticks that fall as trees begin to die inside my once beloved Eden.