I Could Love You With My Whole Heart But I Can’t Trust You, And Trust Is Everything

I want to love you. I want to wrap my arms around your neck and kiss your cheeks. I want to jump on your back and bear hug you until you can’t stop laughing. I want to stay up late with you, and share snacks, curled up on the couch. I want you to be the voice on the other end of the telephone whenever I’m tired or lonely or happy or afraid or just want to tell you I care.

I want to fall into your embrace, fall into you, fall into your love every single day.

But I can’t trust you. And trust is everything.

There was a moment when everything was perfect. When we didn’t have to think. When we laughed at the same stupid jokes and could almost tell what the other was thinking without trying. When I closed my eyes and dreamt of you. When your arms fit perfectly around my shoulders pulling me to you, and I felt safe.

And now I feel lost.

That’s how fragile trust is. One minute you know a person, and the next minute they transform before your eyes, becoming someone foreign and strange and terrifying. Becoming someone you didn’t know they had the power to be.

And there’s no going back.

An invisible line has been broken, a barrier has been put up. It’s like you can almost hear the foundation cracking under your feet. And there are no words that can put two hearts back together.

I want to love you, but I can’t trust you. And trust is everything.

Trust is the glue that holds us together. It’s the unspoken bond of love. It’s the words we say, and don’t, that remind us that love is real. That this is real. That at the end of the day, we are committed to one another. And we’re not leaving.

Sometimes it starts small, a tiny lie, a hidden message, a piece of the past left unrevealed. But the thing about trust is that it’s like a string. It starts off knotted tight, but when it’s broken it unravels, spinning, spinning, thinning out, separating until the thread’s run too skinny to ever be wound back the same way again.

That’s how it is with you, with us.

I want to believe in us. I want to believe in our love. I want to know that at the end of the day you’ll be here for me, as I am for you, and nothing will change that.

But I just don’t know, not anymore.

I want to love you, but maybe love isn’t enough.

Maybe at the end of the day we’re just two broken people, trying to hold onto something that’s cracked beyond repair. Maybe my hands are bruised and broken, trying to put these pieces back together.

Maybe this is me learning that you can’t love without trust, even though I knew that all along.

Maybe this is me loving you, but letting you go.