For My Future Lover

By

Dear future love,

I wonder all the time where I’m going to meet you. In line at the grocery store? Through an app I don’t have the guts to download yet? Will I recognize you when we finally meet? Or have we crossed paths before and I was too busy looking elsewhere to notice? Maybe we’ve known each other for a long time but neither of us have ever thought of us as anything more than what we currently are.

Will you be an artist, a writer, or something completely different? Will we have enough shared interests to make enough conversation to last a while? Will our differences unite or separate us?

I worry you will break my heart, that you will become another memory of love gone sour. I worry I’ll hurt you, too blinded by my own scars to see yours. I worry it will be another case of wrong timing, where one of us will move before it really has a chance to take off.

I know I don’t want you to take on all my problems like they’re yours. And I don’t want to become your problem solver, either. I don’t want to take on your world so much that I forget my own. Where licking your wounds becomes our thing, while my own grief is left untended and festering. I want us to be supportive in the healthiest of ways.

I hope you can forgive me if I don’t trust you right away. I hope you can look past my baggage, my past hurts that make me cautious. I hope you can see that trying despite the disappointments is really an act of courage. And I hope I can see the same things in you.

I’ve been waiting for you for a long time, but when confronted with your reality, I am scared. I am scared we won’t be what we wanted, or that we won’t want the same important things. I am scared I will love you so much that losing you will break me. I have been broken before; I am in no hurry to break again. Sometimes I still dream of the past and it still has the ability to hurt me. Only now it hurts like small pins instead of knives. But despite the dreams, I still find myself waking up in hopes of something better, something I have yet to know.

I’m hoping that something is you.