It was never love at first sight for us

It wasn’t love at first sight when I met you. I don’t know if I believe in that anymore or if I did at all, honestly. I mean, I thought I did. For so many years, I was convinced that that was how I was going to meet the one. I’m sure everyone’s had thoughts like that, right? Where you’re convinced that somehow, someway, despite the odds, you’ll find your love in the way that’ll make for that perfect story five, ten, twenty years from now.

But I couldn’t have loved you when I saw you if I didn’t even know what love was. I’d said it, sure, but we say a lot of things we don’t mean. I told boys, men, that I was in love with them so many times I started believing it myself. You know how it is — the more you say something as truth, the more it starts to feel like it. I tricked myself into this sort of disillusion for so long that when I met you, it seemed like you were breaking everything I’d ever known. You were destroying the walls, the mirrors, the tricks that the girls before unknowingly started.

You, it, wasn’t a breath of fresh air — no, you were a shock to my system that pried my eyes open to the ocean I was drowning in. My chest tightened whenever you woke me to this reality that it felt safer to live in the bubble I’d created for myself. Even if it was only a matter of time until I succumbed to the weights I’d tied around my ankles, I would have rather died like that then reckon with the truths trying to keep me alive.

I can’t really understand the next part but you didn’t disappear. You didn’t just walk away, leaving me there to figure it out myself. I gave you so many reasons to, before we even got anywhere close to where we are today. I made doors out of the concrete walls closing in on us, desperate for you to walk away before I broke you too. I was lighting up everything around me, both trying to escape and punish myself for everything I’d ever done to get myself here.

You opened my eyes too many times for me to close them again, and I started to see the illusions I’d spent at least two decades building disintegrate into the water piling on my chest. Love. Sex. Heartbreak. Wounds I didn’t even know were there. Why didn’t I see things this way before? Why did you have to come along and ruin the world I’d built? As long as I kept myself numb, things weren’t all bad, you know.

They didn’t hurt as much as they did once you took the anesthesia away.

I really thought I knew what love was. I thought I had it figured out. It was sacrifice. It was giving someone else parts of yourself you’d never get back. It was putting yourself last in order to put them first. It was nailing yourself to a cross you were carrying for the both of you. It could be happy, sure, but more than that, it was fire. It was anger. Passion. Intensity that could kill you. But at least it’d be for love.

But when you dove into those waters with me and showed me a way out. Helped me remove the anchors tying me down. Put your arms around mine and swam with me to the top. I saw your heart, beating so hard, torn and scarred, sometimes barely holding on, but holding on nonetheless. I saw love in the sweat beating down your forehead. I heard it in the words you whispered to me while we floated towards shore. I felt it in the touch of your hand on mine. I tasted it in your lips, in the sweet music we made. I’ve seen it grow with us, keep us close, heal our wounds. I’ve seen it turn the ocean into something to be feared into something to be embraced.

So, it might not have been love at first sight.

But I can guarantee it was love at last.