Soul[Mate].

In love I become someone who has a history of being disappointed by those who promised to love her forever, to cherish her unconditionally. The scars and bruises of these rejections lay close below the surface, unassuming to the naked eye, but brutal when poked and prodded.

The message wrapped up in that bruised ego is this: You are too much. No one will ever be able to handle being around you for good.

I used to describe myself as though I had a roulette wheel in my body where my heart was supposed to be. That over the years, I had worked and I had healed from much of the hurt that I had encountered, but every once and a while the wheel would turn and the ball would fall straight through a hole. In that hole resided the broken heart deep in my subconscious – the heart that could not tolerate being held. When I fall in that hole, I could spend a whole day or week desperately climbing my way out tooth and nail, unable to tell lover from enemy in all of that darkness.
Recently, in the past four or five years, I have had an opportunity to find out what I become in love, real love, over nearly half a decade, and I am happy to say that it is much smoother and less tumultuous.
I am quieter in my discomfort, and more easily able to love and be loved. The immediacy of the voice that wants to shout PROVE.IT.I.DARE.YOU is pacified and calm.  I’ve become a quiet thing. A calm thing. A loving thing. I’ve become a deep thinker and passionately intensive. I’ve become a solidifier of my own boundaries and space – providing myself ample room to move about freely. I have figured out where I end and [you] begin, and I plan on keeping it that way.

I wish I could explain how I put myself in harm’s way, repeatedly – action born out of my voracious hunger for love and connection. How I put myself there, even when the part of my heart that knew there had to be something more begged and pleaded for me to stop.

I want to describe how difficult it can be to open up to [you], when the voice telling me not to trust, that it’s a trick is so thick in my throat my words won’t formulate. I want to describe to [you] the feeling of having betrayed yourself, so that [you] might understand better why I withdraw beneath your touch if [you] move too fast or I am startled. I wish I could describe the experiences that came before, where I wasn’t in control and fast was a sure indicator of impending shame.

It’s not that I’m unwilling.
It’s that there are occasions where I forget the time and the place and the fact that I am safe, now.  And that I work on it, because I believe in my heart that [you] are worth it, and that I am worth it too.

I think of myself differently now, like a shiny penny or something beautiful and lucky. I do this work because I know that I deserve more: more pleasure, more safety, more joy, more comfort, more spontaneity, more imagination.
I want to tell [you] that I’m dedicated to bringing my whole self here, to a relationship and to rituals behind closed doors. And that I know, now, that I am worth a relationship of this magnitude.  Everything will be OK in the end.  If it's not OK, it's not the end.  Unfortunately sometimes we just need to erase the texts, delete the number & move on...