I have always loved you.

I loved you with a passion words cannot capture.

You molded me into your warrior queen with every morning kiss on the cheek,

Your mystery captivated my soul as you effortlessly swept pieces of my fragile heart, and we went to war.

You taught me to wrestle people and the angst that most days haunted my soul.

You wouldn’t let me settle.

Your hardass ways were foreign, and yet calmed my raging rawness with a stubborn consistency I could not scare away.

You sat down on the roller coaster and never got off, even when I screamed, “Get the f*ck out!”

You stayed.

You made me trust you, when all the fibers of my being cringed.

My crazy irrationalities soothed by your nauseating logic.

You unleashed my beast and stood in the middle of the fire,

wrapping gentle arms around my burning body, like “Bruce Lee water” melting my walls into a sappy puddle of vulnerability.

Every day you told me I was beautiful—and I started to believe it.

You loved me without ego as you locked the cage door behind you, ready for the fight of your life.

You jumped in with both feet, even though one of mine dangled out with constant questions.

Your formidable presence morphed me into a trash talking killer, because she was always in there, waiting to be born.

I will remember every moment.

Your touch on my skin, fingers intertwined through all those dark nights.

There was a place on your chest meant for my head, thick hair against my face.

Limbs like magnets, entangled,

the world seemed safe in that embrace.

Your smell, a strong scent I wished I could bottle, never close enough,

and yet, maybe too close, too attached.

Somewhere along the way, I lost myself.

I tried to save you, but you were already schooled in the “hard knocks” of survival.

I saw the “little boy” with brown Bambi eyes, filled with stories you so bravely endured.

My fierce feminine wrapped arms around, until you couldn’t breathe,

we couldn’t breathe.

You stayed close because my departure was unbearable,

and we squeezed each other, until the carcasses of our old selves were hardly recognizable.

We burned down, lost each other in the smoke, until your familiar voice no longer called me, “my love.”

I couldn’t comprehend a world without you. Every direction pointed to a memory.

Your mesmerizing smell, our laughs when it was just you and I, the taste of butter on the steak you always cooked to perfection.

The way only you could tell me to calm down, and the way it often didn’t work.

I will never leave this world without knowing what it feels like to be adored.

To be the “one” you’ve always been waiting for,

but what happens when the “one” is no longer “one,” but a tragic version of who she was?

Claw marks, gripping to an outgrown past, morphing into a wailing newborn, as she cut cords from the womb of safety,

in search of the girl with wild eyes, demanding ecstasy with every unknown moment.

My Bambi legs were not strong enough to leave on my own, so I fell blindly into another man’s arms, and I am deeply sorry.

That I f*cked up love, and followed my heart down a human path of “I could have done that better.”

Even still, the memories can re-write themselves into new creations of “I lived. I learned. I forgave, especially myself. I face-planted, and I got back up. Kinder, more real, and ready,”

accepting that I will never own a person and they will never own me.

Love is larger than past or future shapes, but can be found in the tender cheeks we hold between our present hands.

Relationships may end, but the undercurrent of love keeps flowing, waiting for new eyes to drown in your unique ocean soul,

Making memories to write about.

And let’s get real,

I’m terrified for “love” to find me again. Asking me to take off my clothes and become intimately known, signing a lease on “potential rejection.”

I keep my pants on, and ward off potential suitors, because I am still healing.

And so years later, I lie alone on my couch, with a smile, because my own company is “enough” and I trust,

that love doesn’t have to be found, it just morphs into different wrinkles on hands that hold yours.

New expressions on the head shaking at your absurdity, attached to arms that think you’re magic anyway.

No need to rush, because being in love with myself is a passionate adventure, full of deep conversations, belly laughs, and cuddling up in silence.

Love is stronger than one person or specific moment in time.

Just as seasons change,

Love can morph from cut off shorts, into warm spiced lattes.

Love can transform from hot nights of lightning bugs, into messy pumpkin carving,

And then, as we prepare for winter stars of wonder, we pause,

in gratitude, that love always lives,

if we feel it our bones.

Love is a force always ready to say “yes” again.

And someday, when we least expect it, we turn around, and find an old pair of comfy pajamas, that we put back on.