To Be Alone With You

I remember the first night I held you. In person. Not our texts, not our YIM messages, not on Pounced. In person. Shivering alone until in subzero temperatures at the bus station until you pulled up. I saw your face and your smile and I knew the brightness of heaven for just a split second. I held you, you held me, I sucked your cock and a few days later you broke my heart. “Too immature” you told me while I was just 18 and you were 26. I wept. You asked me to cry more quietly. The Michigan snow glinted in the sunlight in defiance of my heartache and I helped your dad split wood. And I could not be alone with you. I wanted to. I wanted to worship your body and hold your face and make sure you knew someone in this world loved you for just existing and you would not let me.

To love someone is to sign up for heartache. In the best case scenario one of you loves fiercely and intensely and then one of you dies. In most scenarios it seems that people tolerate each other because going through life alone is scary and miserable even if they, in tandem, make each other miserable. The fire of love cools down and they stoke the coals occasionally so they can hold onto their home; their family; their social status; their place in society. They are not lovers who stroke the face of the other in passing. They are not lovers who tremble like birds in the winter at the touch of the beloved. They are pragmatists. They survive. When they enter a room they are never alone as they shoulder the weight of existence and they aren’t vulnerable even with the person who they’ve felt from the inside. To penetrate and be penetrated is vulnerability unless one is adroit enough to make it about their pleasure instead of the raw and wild sense of connection.

I remember the first night I saw you. You were in a ridiculous shirt, with a ridiculous horse themed haircut because you just. . .loved horses. We smoked hookah together and in my nicotine buzz I got baklava and Turkish coffee and when I hit the hookah I gave you a taste of what my mouth could do. You were awkward. You were sexually repressed. You were beautiful when you cried and beautiful when you dumped me. I wanted to love you beyond measure and I made you cum so hard one night that you started crying and then things got a little too vulnerable. And I could not be alone with you. I kept hoping you’d show up to the run of the play I was doing. Every night I looked for you because I told you it was happening. On the last night of the show I wept after getting a standing ovation from a packed house. I just wanted you to see me. In my full glory and doing one of the few things in life I’m good at. Then you left me via a text message and went to Houston. I wanted to love you and let you know you don’t have to be an independent boulder in this life and you would not let me.

To love someone is to sign up for dissolution. To be loved well and truly the individual has to drop their guards and defenses and let the other person probe and explore them well and truly. To get inside of the other person and see whether their liver is laced with fat or their heart is engorged. To see and smell the guts of their process and see the expansion and contraction of lungs. To feel a beating heart in your hands and not crush it. Loving is not simply an act of words or feelings. To love is to dissolve that barrier between you and the other person. All the gross and sticky parts are vulnerable. Someone might take advantage. Someone might hurt you. Someone might kill you. It is scary, it is terrifying, but what is the point of existing if the world only sees half your light? To love is to drop your shield and say to another soul “here I am naked and unarmored; stab me if you wish”.

I remember the first night I met you. In the square of Denton, TX across from Jupiter Coffee. I was nervous and shaky and nineteen and you were older than me. I saw that you were nervous and shaky and born in ’89 and neither of us knew what was going to happen. You were steady and measured and one date later you came to my house and I grabbed a growing bulge while we cuddled on my couch. A month in I thought about breaking up with you. Two months in I knew I couldn’t lose you. I fought, I fought, I fought. I grasped and clawed like a cat in a burlap sack to keep you. I scratched you, I yeowled, I raged, I clawed to keep you next to me. I burned dreams at the altar of you because I thought if I sacrificed just enough you could love me. You could really love me. I could be alone with you and have the peace of knowing that I was whole. That when I showed you my guts there was no revulsion. To know you were the soft rain on the rose bushes at the house we once owned. That I was going to get to watch you wince at my hot-sauce and ginger coated lips until we died. I gave you ten years and you gave me self-protection and barriers. The songs we sang were discordant and awful and I could not be alone with you. The ghosts that haunt my family hung around and you were haunted by that soul crushing eidolon of security. I burnt so much on your altar getting you to see me.

To love someone is to turn inward. I have never been the innocent in my relationships. There is a part of me that thinks if we aren’t in conflict occasionally then we’ve both checked out of the relationship. People always talk about love languages and the pathetic fact of the matter is that mine is conflict. I don’t know any other way. Conflict is what I grew up with and anger was love. And that hurts people. And so I try, I try, I try over and over again. To not be an asshole. To not pick fights. To be supportive and just let them know that I love them for them. Yet I can’t fight the impulse to critique, correct, argue, PUSH. Love may be turning inward and examining faults but it is exhausting. And as I feel the beloved slipping away I grasp harder and more violently and create more conflict. Because that’s what I saw as a child. To love is to fight; I picked up my sword to make you strong.

I remember the first day you held me. I shook like a sparrow in the cold despite the humid April weather of Oregon. I cried and you fucked me and we went to a shooting range and that same night you broke my heart. I wanted your love though. I wanted you. I could smell on your skin that you were the person I was made for. And I chased you. I took a job in El Paso to be closer to you. I gave up all I could to be with you. We fight, we argue, we get frustrated, we fuck, we make up, we live. I hate all the ways you act like a boy because I never got to be a boy. I had to replace my mom at eight. I hate all the ways you can just tune out and expect things to be taken care of. Because all I have ever known is the burden of responsibility. I hate that your idea of heaven is a steak, some wine, a stable home, and no one fucking with you; my idea of heaven is a world redeemed and I want to make that happen. You are the shiny side of the coin. Yet I see you smile. I see you laugh. I see you holding my hand in the hospital and staying calm despite your terror of losing me. The look in your eyes. The look in them between the quiet moments of doctors or nurses checking in. Someone who wants to be there. And I am finally alone with you.

To love someone is to die before you’ve ever come close.