they say that love has been the selfish and most selfless thing in the world, they’re not wrong.
growing up, my relationship with my family has been somewhat distant and “untold”. only when the pandemic came, when we’re stuck between the four corners of our house then made us closer. i was always told as a child that my parents love me, because they are my parents, that it is their love that bear fruit to me as their daughter, it is my dad’s nose and my mom’s eyes and heart face shape that i share so they love me, yes. but i was never told they love me and they never told me.
i was always seen as someone strong as the triumph in my life overshadow the love people think i do not need, so they put it somewhere else.
my years with my boyfriend has been the most amazing ones that i had and i only share the superficial side for the world to see. it has been a steady love, almost serene, and sometimes familiar, anarchic and special. in our third year as a couple and fourth year of knowing each other, i think we never haven’t gotten over our getting-to-know-phase. “to love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.” during the course of our relationship, my hair changed maybe twenty times, and his eyeglasses changed for about seven.
i loved him soundly to know how his snore sounds like, i would know instantly “it’s him!” just by looking at the back of his head in a pool of strangers. but i would share something more intimidate about us. (with his mutual consent)
andrean’s love is like a wing in a heartbeat, nevertheless almost liberating. this led me time to deepen my enticement with individuality — knowing what sparks enthusiasm as a twelve-year-old special arts student in junior high school at heart. i believe i am still relieving all the times i wasted because i was shelved away from my own person before we met with the downside of healing my inner child as well. it was funny because somehow i think i used our relationship to know myself better.
for our third year together, the excitement lie low like most relationship does. maybe because we already know us past our board exams (which i claimed to be the worst phase of our relationship and if we are bound to surpass, nothing more can get between us), we would exchange checking papers during our review, we somehow pick up petty fights with each other during those times like how he would like to sit next to his friends and not “mine”. our love is a devotion, a promise to witness each other’s live and we are already in the bubble.
his love liberated me. he is my biggest fan and i am the same to him. whatever i set my mind to, he would always support it all through the way. the things that i love that i had put down for the longest time was picked up— i was able to immersed myself again in good books, gained the confidence to date myself alone (because he would), published these crazy essays which basically just me thinking out loud and many more.
it was my first time to encounter his love, so when it came, it was new and vividly unfamiliar that i didn’t seem to know even how to press my nose to the glass.
for the past few years, i have reprieve fixing my bad habit of self-sabotaging which deeply affects our relationship as well. i am a ticking time bomb and all i’m good at is self-loath whenever post-temper clarity hits too hard after i’ve done or say anything hurtful.
i believe there were already countless of times i pushed him away, worry too much as i always feel that i am undeserving of love in general. this greatly offends him.
i hurt him, and i hurt myself when all he wanted to do was to love me.
i realized saying you are unlovable is an insult to the significant people in your life who loves you. the delineation that we are not allow to feel love if we are not yet healed is wrong. it diverts and deprive us from our fundamental needs when we need it the most. on odd instances, i also learned that loving someone doesn’t excuse us from taking care of ourselves, or be comfortable with our disrespects or lapses. plausibly to nurture ourselves as we clasps their hand in navigating our truest self is the most beautiful thing we could do for them.
i’m sometimes convinced that he loves me more than i think he do— as he understand the emotional ups and down of being a feminine woman and figuring life out. i know this is just a projection of my unresolved insecurities. but he just knows my anger is not to be seen lightly as it is vulnerable in his presence. he always know the right things to tell my guts that i am just as worthy like everyone else.
whenever i give him cold shoulder, isolate myself, and not communicate for hours, i imagine him in the outside of the outburst saying “it’s okay, let me just love you.”
i would hate myself more for it.
the thing about love is that you expect to only receive what you think you give and anything beyond these expectations measures up to question the love we reciprocate. but honestly, in my own opinion, we could never change how much the other person loves us, just as we could never change their innate nature. maybe sometimes the righteous thing to do, is to accept the love regardless of whether we think we are undeserving of it. maybe that way, we can start to see our own worth inside their affection, mirroring their notion what it is that made me enough (?). and it will be enough for us to see / see that is it enough.
i tap the arms of my mom and dad three times i love you i love you i love you, i grew up in a home where love is never told but i stand alone to radiate love as fiercely and wholeheartedly to those around me, because he heals me, still.
my mom said i love you, child for the first time.
i am the worst person in the world, yet someone’s eyes would soften and in his embrace, the war inside my mind transcend.
to andrean,
if your ways to love is to let them love themselves more, then i am lucky. you put me on a pedestal and in one of the justice scale— weigh things out between my shoulders in my unconsciously forgetting self. “to be loved is to be known” or so they say, then it must be a niche to have love the version of you that already cease to exist and will be your becoming.