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January 3, 2015

This Heart is Breaking But Still Open.

James Morely/Flickr

My love, how did we end up here?

Was it me? Or was it you?

Or was it neither of us and just a cruel trick from the ether?

For surely the cruelest trick of all tricks is to be allowed to fall in love with another who is in a different place, has different dreams, different priorities, different wants and different needs.

I still have so many dreams for us—so much hope that if we can brave this storm, we will be the strongest, most loving couple to ever share their kisses with the sunrise or their naked skin with a dewy meadow.

I still crave to set the world on fire, to set your heart ablaze with my love and commitment. Despite the pain, restlessness, doubt and tears, I still want to grow old with you. I want to watch your dreams come true and to be one of them, to share my life entirely with you.

I’m not done learning you and I am not finished growing yet.

I’ve not finished my exploration of your depths, your fears, your pleasures or your mind. I am but a novice when it comes to your heart and mine; you will not find a more avid student than that which lives in me.

I want to grow. Will you grow with me?

I long for a life with you that seems so clear to me, one of kindness and peace, commitment and understanding. One of support and encouragement and sex that Greek gods would envy and that would burn through all our insecurities until we fully honour the other in their entirety.

A life of compromise for sure—but compromise from a place of love where the happiest moments come from seeing the other smile.

I must, however, admit something to you, for hiding anything is still a lie.

I am not a very good hippie. I believe in love and freedom and kindness and peace and I see the tyranny of money and politics and war and repression. But I also love “Notting Hill” and sometimes shed a tear or two whilst listening to the cheesiest of cheesy love songs. I find yoga beneficial but tiresome and have no interest in psychoactive plant medicine.

I believe in sex, wholeheartedly in fact, but within a committed relationship between two people as an act of trust, intimacy, love and (oh my god) pleasure. I believe in marriage, or rather I very effeminately dream of a big romantic wedding full of laughter and tears and romance and happiness, and want to create our own new traditions in our own, very normal family in our own beautiful but normal house next to our own normal log fire.

I believe in commitment despite agreeing with the proposition that to promise to love someone forever is absurd and irresponsible. Perhaps this is because I also view love as an action and way of thinking—a feeling and perhaps because I recognize my own absurdity and irresponsibility when it comes to my heart. And despite my dreadlocks and converse and use of the word “awesome,” I’m not “free love” enough to ever pretend to be okay with letting you love another whilst you’re with me.

I would make you choose.

I would love to be able to grant another that sort of freedom and liberty but not at the expense of my own heart. And my heart has a limit. And I know it. And I’m proud of it.

And it is also entirely filled with you.

So my love, I don’t understand how we got here and I don’t know how we get out. But I do know that I am willing to try, again, to paint our story anew with vibrancy and texture. And perhaps, if we can both learn to keep the other a priority, to recognise and learn to shed our own fears, attachments and scars that stop us from letting go to the other and jump in to this with two feet, legs, eyes, ears and lips, we could be okay.

I’m game if you are, but only if you really are. Let’s grow together and make our own, beautiful life together. Let’s learn each other, learn from the past and learn to love better. I fear my little heart can’t take much more. But whilst it can take any at all, it is here for you.

Broken, terrified, unsure and scarred, but open to you and everything we could be.

And I suspect, deep down, that it is beating to exactly the same rhythm as yours.

 

 

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Author: Andy Charrington

Editor: Renee Picard 

Photo: James Morley at Flickr 

 

 

 

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