I Can Barely Love Myself, I’m Not Ready To Love Anyone Else

Maybe the people who can’t love themselves are those that easily fall out of love. How could they love and stay in love when they neither can’t love nor know how to love?

I hate to see life and love draining out of people and predominantly because I’ve seen it in Dad. His face looking pale that ever. His dull eyes almost void of anything lively. He looks but doesn’t see. I hate seeing him, slumped on the couch staring blankly at the TV or listening to the radio just to keep his five senses from doing nothing. Just to keep rust from forming up his sleeve. He blabs all the time, mostly about money. He’s tired and defeated and he feels sorry. He says sorry not verbally but somehow I could hear it like a muffled whisper. It’s the sighs’ and grunts in between. The voice that echoes when everything around was silent but then disappears just like that when the TV is on and the radio is beeping. The emptiness was there. Always there, like a sinkhole constantly growing in the midst of our living room. But we ignore it. Pass over it and pretend that it isn’t there, that we don’t see it. But it is always there. Hunting each of us on the very back of our mind where consciousness lies in utter silence. At the dead of the night when everyone was asleep and I am only left with the faint light coming from my study lamp, I hunt myself with questions.

“Is Dad falling out of love with Mom?”

“Are they tired of each other? Are they tired of us?”

“Are we going to last?”

“Will we be able to make it?”

“What the hell am I going to do?”

And I can’t sleep. I find it hard to sleep when I know that there’s a sinkhole below waiting for its time to collapsed and cave in. I plan strategies, I listen to music, I lie to myself. I dream of falling in love and never falling out of love. And there are times where I thought that I got it all figured out. When the clock strikes twelve, I would decide that I have completely figured it out. But it was all a lie. A comforting lie that often strikes at midnight. For when my alarm beeps and the sun rises, I lose it all again.