This I Know

All I want is to feel love and share love and find that same love returned to me with overwhelming truth.

I am absolutely terrified that this will never happen. Six years into my own history of spreading the contents of my heart, I have found that the scars left behind far outweigh most of the infectious energy and beautiful, simplistic affection with which my best relationships were filled.

As soon as each pair of me and him breaks, I lose another tiny sliver of myself, bits and pieces of me that take far longer to heal than they do to splinter. I am in a constant process of recovery, one that I worry will never cease. Every time I near a mended version of myself - as close to my original, innocent, and blissfully naïve self as I can reasonably expect to return - I am somehow swept back into this ever-deepening whirlpool of romance and risk and (or so my fears convince me) eventual pain.

At the same time, I believe adamantly that not every person's experience is so excruciating. I have friends in relationships with staggering constancy and commitment. I know that kind of unconditional, devoted love is possible.

I just do not know why some people have a much more difficult time tracking it down. What makes one person easier to cheat on than another? Surely having the unfortunate ability to claim oneself as a victim of infidelity is not uncommon, though if the sanctity of the word "love" meant to everyone anything at all, affairs would never occur. Still, I cannot help but wonder what it is about me that has allowed three men, on four different occasions, to so surreptitiously seek the company of another while still promising sweet, despicable nothings to their blind, all too trusting girlfriend.

It is a weakness to trust too easily but still more of a weakness to withhold trust completely. Where is the middle ground? Would adjusting my level of faith in others achieve anything, or would nothing at all change?

I have said "I love you" to more than one person, and the triad of words is not one that I use loosely. I live and breathe each and every syllable:
"I," me, the broken girl with an injured spirit
"love," so totally and with abandon
"you," whoever that wonderful boy may be.

I have said "I love you" multiple times and despite reciprocity of the phrase - despite seeming reciprocity through actions and feelings and intrinsic connections - I am always the last to love. His love has always expired, has always run dry well before my own has even begun to plateau.

I leave every relationship, or, more correctly, am left at the end of every relationship, with love to spare, more and more and more to give, and no one willing to receive my gift genuinely.

Even now I am bursting with love, so very much of it that sometimes I do honestly feel like I might explode. Over the years, bruises have piled themselves on top of each other, my body becoming simultaneously immune to the shock yet more sensitive with each additional blow.

Now I love silently. I allow my love to pulse within me, through my veins, through my arteries, leaving my heart and returning once more, always, to my heart and only mine. The hardest truth I know right now is that my greatest love, my most beautiful, my most painful, my most honest, is also the most hopeless love I have ever harbored.

I love and love and love. For years now I have held this love quietly within me. Every fiber of my being wishes to scream out exactly how I feel, and yet every time the opportunity finds me, something convinces me otherwise.

I know he knows and while an unspoken understanding might and should make this heavy burden easier to bear, there exists a distinct unwillingness to even approach the love floating, more so straining, to find equilibrium between me and him.

I love you. Will you ever let me tell you?