“I am going to break this guy’s heart,” I thought to myself. It was our fourth date, and I knew he was a confident person but this evening I could see I made him visibly nervous. He stood in my doorway with a bottle of wine. We had plans to meet for the evening, but that was it. And here he was, visibly trembling in my doorway.
I thought if I made anyone that nervous, there must be something weak in them, something I eventually would find too needy about them, too desperate. These of course were my own projections about things I dislike about myself. But I thought they were indications that I was stepping into something I knew, that I was in control, that I could rationally decide when to leave, as I thought I would if I were to continue.
How very wrong I was. That step tripped me. I fell so hard and I didn’t know if it was the ground or the sky hitting me. I suffered his absences. I split and blazed in his presence. I laughed and cried tears of euphoria with him, for him, because of him. I lived my life in a state of presence I’d never been able to manage before. I never wanted any of our moments together to end. “Ah, THIS is it,” I thought to myself. “This is what it is to love and be loved completely.”
I was safe and I was fully alive for the first time. And maybe the last time.
Britt at Large 