I Would Rather Wait An Eternity For You To Love Me Back Than Love Another

Twenty20, rmalo5aapi
Twenty20, rmalo5aapi

I’d rather live an eternity in the purgatory of your love than one day in the hell of anyone else’s. I would rather lie to myself every hour of every single day that I still have a chance, a hope, a prayer and a whisper of a promise at holding you and feeling you fall asleep lying on my chest than swallow the honest and choking pill that I will most likely die alone watching you smile in photos I will not be in and live a life I will have no part of. That you will grow, your hair will turn to snow and more than you’ll come you’ll go and I will stand and wait and wonder if you will discover that the fire I lit is still hot inside you.

How do I tell you what it feels like to know that you, You, have always been so much that happiness without you is a statistical impossibility, that once I met you my heart left my chest and flew directly into yours. Through your ribcage and it lives there now, where it will always live.

How do I express the pain that comes with knowing that you were and are and always will be that much, but I wasn’t, and am not, and never will be enough to be those things to you? That you can find happiness in arms that are not mine and find passion in lips that are not connected to my face, that do not whisper the words that I have inside me?

How do I fall asleep and wish to wake up each morning knowing I was never enough to make you see a life with me, when I saw and wrote and prayed and never stopped believing in it every moment since our eyes found one another.

* * *

Would you listen if I explained that we are magic and that magic is something that doesn’t require belief to be real, but requires that we make it day in and day out and maybe, just maybe, true magic is the disappearance of two people and the triumphant reemergence with great fanfare and the twirl of a red cape, of one new person instead?

Why is the ONE person that hurts us so badly the ONE person that we so sincerely need to sprint back to when all we need is a tiny breath of relief, a moment of feeling better? Why was I not ever enough to make you see what I see, to help you believe in me as I believed in you?

I am lost beyond the use of maps and stars. I will whisper to you like you can still hear me, I will speak softly across the emptiness and trick myself into thinking you are listening. I will carry you with me and see the world through our eyes instead of my own. I will love you until I die, and then I will start over and love you again, and then when that next light comes I will start fresh and give you more.

Each time through, each heartbreaking lap around this track we so foolishly named Life I will love you, no matter how happy you claim to be with someone else, no matter how much you think that convincing yourself that even though we are not it, we cannot Be it, will make all this go away, I will be there, loving you breathlessly and giving you all I have.

I will sacrifice all I am and drip the blood of my promise on the soil and the earth you stand upon. Perhaps I will begin the slow and painstaking practice of kissing all the glasses and mugs in the cabinets of your home. I will press my lips to their rims and I will leave silently knowing that at some point each and every day, your lips will be touching something that my lips were touching and in that fluttering moment, we were kissing once again.

* * *

If we were children again, made young and naive and blind to the way things just might turn out, would you run away with me? Would you pack your mom’s smallest suitcase and fill it with your favorite clothes but mostly things to eat and the toys you couldn’t bear to leave behind and run off into everywhere with me? The one great adventure of our lives and we’d share it together?

If I made you a book and I made me a book and titled them both “The Things I Did Not Say,” do you understand that my book would hold only one word, a single word on all those hundreds of perfectly crisp pages of white. That on the final page, the only word I did not say through all this would be Goodbye. Would yours hold ink? Would the pages bleed through into each other? Would they look like a watercolor painting of the night sky with too little water and too few stars?

What if I was wrong? What if this too shall not pass and what if I should not amor my fati? Should I scratch them from my skin and call them liars and every single moment of every single day stare at the scars where they onced lived and feel shame that I believed all this was one great push towards some final happiness?

Do I dare? Do I dare my love, speak up and say all the things you don’t want me to say? Do I dare tell you Do Not Go. If Going means leaving and leaving means finding yourself in strange cities or stranger countries without my hand to hold through it all? Do I dare tell you to be with me, BE WITH ME, when I know you will close your eyes and without even entertaining the thought that we could and would be happy, say back to me, as if an automatic response, I Can’t. Do I dare care, when caring is tearing me into tiny shreds of the man I used to be?

Do I tell you to stay with me, to be with me and trust me that what we are is worth taking the leap for and blending the rest of our lives from two into one? Do I dare tell you to love me for the rest of your days and stop pretending that the Knowledge of love is enough to carry me through the darkness of the rest of my life?

It’s not, LOVE is enough, but love is giving and not saying, it’s making and not imagining, it’s holding and not wishing. Love is the reach, not the desire to do so. Love is the kiss not the regretting you cannot. Love is what we give and how we are to the person we love.

How do I tell you, tell you now that Love, true love is a Verb, not a noun that we capitalize to assign more worth that we thought it needed. Love is a verb, it’s an action, do I dare tell you to use it wisely on me? I am already ready to hear that you can’t, but I will wait until the day you can. As I said and I will say again, I would rather spend an eternity in the purgatory waiting for your love than a single burning day in the Hell of anyone else’s. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Poet. Photographer. Author. Buddhist. Follow him on Instagram here

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