Love Is Like Giving Someone A Gun

You smile at me and you’re so close and I just want to kiss you, but I know I won’t. I don’t know if I can. What did we agree on? What were those words we let float into the darkness on that balcony far away? Our filters were overshadowed by the cloudiness that comes with too many glasses of red wine, our hearts struggling between truth and lies and maybe there isn’t even a difference anymore.

You say you like me so much and yet it’s all about her. You say you don’t want to lose me and yet she is the one you want to keep in your life forever. It’s okay, I understand. I am complicated and we are complicated and our history is too. I know you want to see it in black and white, in easy terms. And I do too. I really, really want to be able to draw that line, but I would be lying to myself and sometimes I think you are too.

We aren’t black and white, we are in Technicolor with some grey and black mixed in there. Because for all the times that silent tears streamed down my face when we were talking, you’ve made me laugh and smile at you with a slight shaking of my head. Do you know that that headshake is me unbelieving that you are really here? That we are still here?

I once read somewhere that loving someone is giving them a gun and trusting they won’t pull the trigger. But you did, didn’t you? Was it on purpose? I know that my shot wasn’t, but maybe you didn’t even feel that graze.

We talk so much and yet I have so many questions. And I think that you don’t know the answers to all of them or even half, but there is a voice inside of me telling me that you do and just don’t want to tell me. Why? Are you afraid that the next bullet will hit me straight in the heart? Or are you scared that it would be like turning the gun on yourself and aiming towards yours?

Because let me tell you something: Even if that wound would be lethal, whether for you or me, we would just turn into each other’s ghosts. And we’d be haunted by the other, by how things might have been different if we took a chance. So we will keep on shooting the other and hope the bullets are just grazes.

And maybe one day the barrel will be empty and the only reminder of the wounds will be the scars, telling the story of when our hearts were clouded by the lies we told ourselves to keep us from falling apart.