“There’s always that one person in your life that you will forever have a soft spot for.” ~ kushanwizdom

.

I used to sit and despise this love I had for you, because it seemed that the only thing it ever did was make my life more difficult—until I realized that no matter what may happen, I will never be sorry that I loved you.

It doesn’t matter if I planned on falling in love with you or not, although it’s a battle that seemed to never truly take it easy on my heart or my growing desires for you.

Sometimes the only choice that we have is simply to fall into our feelings, like our warm bed at the end of a long day—giving into them and letting them wash over us, making us forget why we fought them for as long as we did.

It doesn’t even matter if you’ll ever love me back, not that I don’t secretly hope that might happen, because loving you has no dependence on whether you’ll choose to take me in your arms and never let go.

It wasn’t (and still isn’t) about looking for a predetermined end result, but only because letting myself love you had more to do with me learning to love myself.

I had to conquer enormous hurdles within myself in order to admit that I’d fallen in love with someone I had spent so much time and energy trying to prove was all wrong for me.

Because in doing so, I had to admit that maybe even I don’t know what’s truly good for me.

I’d used society’s models of what my love should look like, and I used a map of the easiest road to a destination that I thought I needed, all the time wondering why it never seemed to fit.

Until I realized there was a difference in loving someone because we should, versus loving someone because it comes as naturally as waking to a new sunrise each morning.

I can’t say for sure that I know what will happen between us tomorrow, next week or even next month, but no matter what transpires, I know now that there will never be a time that I am sorry I loved you.

I’ll never be sorry that I gave as much of myself as I did to you, because in learning to love without expectation, I also learned how intensely I love.

I’ll never be sorry that I let my walls down with you, though these are still words that make my eyes burn behind the bitter truth that I had kept them up for as long as I did. The way you used each word to demolish my barbed-wire fences and concrete walls tore at a piece of my heart, because I never had anyone who even cared that I’d built them there to begin with.

And maybe that is just one reason why I’ll never be sorry that I loved you—because you were the only one who could see the truth in my heart and what lay beyond the high walls I had built to keep so many out.

Perhaps once they came down, you didn’t really know what to do with the new and beautiful landscape of my soul stretched out before you like a kingdom of Oz—and even if you still never decide that you want to see where that path leads, I’ll always be grateful for you showing me that, no matter what, it’s always worth letting ourselves love someone who has stolen a piece of our heart.

Perhaps at one point, the fact that you had taken that piece and stuffed it down in the pocket of torn memories and secret exchanges, singed any lingering expectations that I had about what love should look like, and so I tried to steal it back from you.

But it just became another lesson that you taught me—that we can’t truly steal back a piece of our heart if the other person isn’t willing to let it go.

And though we’ve talked in circles and around monuments of moments, so caked in intention that we both found ourselves dusty and confused, I still have never asked you if you love me.

Perhaps some would say that maybe I just don’t want to know the truth—but as to which truth that is, I’m still unsure.

In reality, I have never asked because I have no need to. I know how I feel about you and your deep brown eyes which seem to follow me everywhere—and that has been the only truth that I needed to know.

And I trust that if there ever is anything to know—you’ll tell me. I don’t believe that I will ever have to dig for answers in order for you to confide in me—simply, if we get to a point where our paths have crossed, then I’ll know that whatever conversations we need to have will come in their own time.

You might be on a journey yourself. Maybe you have realized that you could never love me—or possibly you’ve realized that you already do—but when we admit things to ourselves, and more importantly to others, we are often left with the thought: “Well, what now?”

I don’t want to become a situation you find yourself in, unsure how you ever got there in the first place.

If you do someday realize that you love me, then I want that step towards me to be a conscious one. One that you see coming, and perhaps one you’ve already figured out some answers about.

But if that day never comes—and if I watch you smile and receive love in the arms of another woman—then I’ll still never be sorry that I have loved you, because in my act of loving you, I learned how to sink myself down deep into the parts of my soul that I was scared to venture for far too long.

And the real truth isn’t that I will never be sorry that I loved you, but rather—I’m not sorry that I love you still.

Despite everything and the nothing that has permeated the air around us.

I still love you—and that is something I won’t ever be sorry for.

.

Author: Kate Rose

Image: Flickr/Bruna Schenkel

Editors: Yoli Ramazzina; Caitlin Oriel