What are you so afraid of?
Who taught you how to love?
You see, there has to be some reason why you shy away from every attempt to fill the cracks of the crumbling infrastructure you call your body; a reason why you feel such hesitation towards a proclamation of devotion; why you itch and scratch away affection like it's an infection; why intimacy is the monster under your bed, the skeletons in your closet.
What are you so afraid of?
Well, I guess it makes sense when the first thing you ever learned of love was how to dodge a fist. You see, you know something is wrong when your idea of love is when you're waiting to get punched so that it starts making sense.
Like broken lamps, like doors slammed shut, like holes in the wall in the hallway upstairs; love like fear; like trapped; like suffocation; like someone asking you why you're so afraid of love when he made you forget your own name and bent your reflection beyond the recognizable.
What has love ever done for you but give you sore knees and a battered heart?
How can you find solace in love when you found God by praying for Him to save you from it?
Love, to you, is synonymous with pain.
Like a ghost, tapping on the walls and opening doors you had tried to keep closed, rattling the bars of the empty cage in your chest; like a third grade crush in heart doodles and cursive names; like the sunrise you stayed up late enough to see; love is something you were never supposed to be able to touch. What is love but a distant horizon, the end of a rainbow; a thing that is so beautiful from a distance, yet so intangible to the touch.
Love is the ultimate contradiction.
You see, love has the potential to generate hope, to help, to heal. But too often, when put into human hands, love is used to belittle, to bruise, to break.
Because love is so evasive —always slipping through cracks, walking on tiptoe, coming home at 3 in the morning smelling of liquor and stale cigarettes— when we find love, we hold on tightly, grasping, so afraid of letting go, that we forget that a clenched fist cannot hold a hand, and a human cannot be a home.
So let go.
What are you so afraid of?
You see, there has to be some reason why you shy away from every attempt to fill the cracks of the crumbling infrastructure you call your body; a reason why you feel such hesitation towards a proclamation of devotion; why you itch and scratch away affection like it's an infection; why intimacy is the monster under your bed, the skeletons in your closet.
What are you so afraid of?
Well, I guess it makes sense when the first thing you ever learned of love was how to dodge a fist. You see, you know something is wrong when your idea of love is when you're waiting to get punched so that it starts making sense.
Like broken lamps, like doors slammed shut, like holes in the wall in the hallway upstairs; love like fear; like trapped; like suffocation; like someone asking you why you're so afraid of love when he made you forget your own name and bent your reflection beyond the recognizable.
What has love ever done for you but give you sore knees and a battered heart?
How can you find solace in love when you found God by praying for Him to save you from it?
Love, to you, is synonymous with pain.
Like a ghost, tapping on the walls and opening doors you had tried to keep closed, rattling the bars of the empty cage in your chest; like a third grade crush in heart doodles and cursive names; like the sunrise you stayed up late enough to see; love is something you were never supposed to be able to touch. What is love but a distant horizon, the end of a rainbow; a thing that is so beautiful from a distance, yet so intangible to the touch.
Love is the ultimate contradiction.
You see, love has the potential to generate hope, to help, to heal. But too often, when put into human hands, love is used to belittle, to bruise, to break.
Because love is so evasive —always slipping through cracks, walking on tiptoe, coming home at 3 in the morning smelling of liquor and stale cigarettes— when we find love, we hold on tightly, grasping, so afraid of letting go, that we forget that a clenched fist cannot hold a hand, and a human cannot be a home.
So let go.
What are you so afraid of?
⬼⤗
This is a piece I wrote when I was 17 years old. I have grown substantially in my ability and capacity to love since then, but this piece speaks to my journey.
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