Lover, you shouldn't come over

How lucky I am to feel so much, I say through gritted teeth as I wipe the blood from my lip.

I write a blog (or rather, the blog writes me), haphazardly, about growing and learning and changing through relationships as I age. Something I keep bumping up against, begrudgingly so, is that in this life I will have enough of these experiences to write and write and write until I watch from above people I haven’t met yet crowd around a small plot of freshly disturbed soil, looking bereft and perhaps, quietly, a little relieved - either because they are glad to be rid of a portion of their chaos, or they are glad I am finally rid of all of mine. The life of a writer; cursed by the ever-looming sense that no matter how many essays are concluded, stories are finished, or poems are rhymed, whatever it is you were meant to say will never really be spoken. It is never truly over. No vocabulary in the world could grasp the way you feel. No vocabulary ever will.

So when only a couple of months go by between typing away excitedly about the possibility of living for the sake of it, experiencing just to experience, feeling around blindly for joy wherever I may go, and opening another piece with a rather uncharacteristically mundane image of my own burial, I am forced to sit here and admire the full scope of emotions that I am capable of experiencing. And so quickly, too; dancing in your kitchen alone at 3AM to someone else’s headphones and a glass of wine, smiling to the Sleeping in the dark through the open window, then waking up the next morning face down in your pillow, watching your mother roll away in the dark with a disquieting, almost preternatural groan through the eyes of a little girl you couldn’t bare to recognise if she smiled at you in the street, with only hours in between. One day I will learn to drive, but I must first learn how to breathe through the whiplash that comes with learning to walk.

Yesterday, I did something that felt very grown up of me. There was a man I was afraid I might one day love (a man I have been afraid I might one day love for years), and I have recently been stumbling past the first few crumbling bricks of an unlit passageway to collect him and bring him back home with me, despite it being a passageway I wasn’t sure I’d come out the other side of. When I had started the walk, I was leaving through a gate dappled with wilting daisies, thirsty forget-me-nots, and growing anemones I had mistaken for weeds. I hoped him to be fertiliser. The more steps I took, though, the more I looked back - and it wasn’t because I doubted he would follow me back home, Hades, but because I knew he would. I stopped still one day in an effort to right my dizzying mind and found myself looking back, analysing the growth of the gate I had left behind through spinning eyes. Now I saw it - gold chrysanthemums bloomed like outstretched fingers, purple sweet peas kissed the walls, blue asters overgrew the daisies, and peach gladiolus guarded the rotting wood like it was love. They seemed to curve together in a choir, all to whisper something I had to shout;

I have not given myself enough time yet. I have not met the new me yet. There is not yet enough of me to give away to someone else.

And so, in so many words (albeit much less dramatised), I had to tell him that - because you cannot keep someone else’s bouquets alive if you can’t even recognise your own flowers. You cannot learn to bloom if you are burying yourself in someone else’s garden.

Then what do you do? An hour long conversation on not being ready - you had 23 more hours that day. Then what? You get a whole life flashing behind your eyes and behind someone else’s tongue and behind the walls of your lungs, and then you are supposed to go back to your life? A life where nothing Bad had happened between you and the shadowed figure you can see kissing your stomach, not yet, not really, but the same life where you know you could never fix the gaping tear in your stomach that the Bad would cause?

I wrote paragraphs on answering the call through the candyfloss. I wanted to live a whole life. To throw myself into something and decide how beautiful it was as I went. To let myself go, run, worry when we get there. I wanted to be young and make my mistakes and deal with the consequences later. But now I realise that’s not how it works. You can’t choose not to worry. You can’t choose to ignore the risks forever. Sometimes you actually are better safe than starry eyed.

And I lie when I say I haven’t lived that life before - I have thrown myself into many a thing and blown the warnings to the wind like dandelion seeds. I have seen the film, and I sat still in the theatre for years once I saw the ending, unblinking, until cobwebs covered the chairs and dust danced through my hair. But it was not the love of a man that wiped me clean. It was the flowers my friends sent. The books I read. The pastries I tasted. The things I screamed. The things I have never had time to do whilst I was busy watering someone else’s garden.

I will continue to write these like every post is a new revelation. Possibly forever. But perhaps what I am actually trying to teach myself is that there is a reason I will be able to write and write and write about love and relationships; everything I have learnt about love will always mean nothing. I have loved different people in my life and I have loved no two in the same way, because they will never be the same person. There’s only one of all of us, and applying my last love’s lesson to my next one will never work the way I hope it will. All you can ever do is learn and adapt, and maybe the only purpose of any of this is to be able to see the beauty in feeling everything and learning nothing. At the root of it, I will forever be a child, fresh and new and budding. Stained and still untainted. Perhaps that is why it feels so vulnerable to love; no matter what I see, I will always come to you like a child. I will look at you and tell you I can look after myself while my hands outstretch and my eyes scream look after me, I need you. Beneath all of this, beneath everything, all we ever ask each other for is a love that makes us feel the safety we were supposed to feel as children.

Maybe that will come to me. If there is that safety out there, I can find it. I can nurture it. I can grow it in a new garden that I grow with someone else, with the seeds from my own garden, bursting with life and colour and sights and smells, and theirs, the same, with their own chosen flowers. And then I will not have to bury myself at all, but bloom instead. When I walked away from my garden to get this man, I mistook my anemones for weeds, and thus as I went down the path I glared angrily at the weeds as though I was the one who spread them. I picked at seeds I’d sown that had yet to bloom for fear of my gate being unappealing to someone else. I hadn’t given them a chance to grow, I realised, and all at once I felt like a mother again. So I turned on my heels and ran back to where I came from, and as I did, daffodils popped up lovingly through the cracks in the path.

And it hurt, lovely, to run this way. To turn my back on the unlit path, knowing I might never know what’s on the other side. For the first time in my life I am walking away from something that still might be. And I see now that one of the bravest things I can ever do is abandon something that might have worked for the chance to become someone that could make it work.

And wherever I go, however we turn out, I deserve for it to be real, and strong, and deliberate, and gentle. You deserve the same, and maybe there is a beautiful world somewhere where we will become those people, in however many days -

however many weeks

however many

glances

months

years

however many

kisses

dances

seconds

however many

lovers.

together, maybe. In however many.

And until then, I will feel everything. And I will learn nothing. I will talk to my plants. And what a privilege it is to be a part of any of it.

How lucky I am to feel so much, I say with my arms outstretched on the back of a bike driving past the sea. How lucky I am to feel so much, I say as I cradle my own limbs on my bedroom floor. How lucky I am to feel so much, I say as the sun hits my friend's necklace whilst we sing on the balcony. How lucky I am to feel so much, I say through gritted teeth as I wipe the blood from my lip. How lucky I am to feel so much, I say as his teeth carefully mark my thighs. How lucky I am to feel so much, I whisper as I run my fingertips along the scars of healed bitemarks.

One day I won’t be afraid to have someone I know I won’t have to look back for.

Orpheus and Eurydice