I Want To Love You At Your Worst

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I have never told someone that I loved them (lest been in love before) so it goes without saying that I don’t know that certain feeling that enamored poets write about and what hopelessly smitten balladeers sing of. Being a man of reason, I can’t help but question and find out what it feels like to be in love. I have asked countless people what it feels like to tell someone that you love them with every fiber of their being and their answers are all the same: 

“It feels good.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It just does.”

Maybe there is some truth to the saying that love is blind, that being love negates the sight of the rational being inside of us and reduces us to nothing but people who are bound by their attachment to this certain, special someone and they let this person guide them through the dark path of doubt and uncertainty and they are content with this. It is beyond me why they are content with someone else to let them illuminate a path when they could do it themselves.

Then it hit me: people love the idea of being attached, as much as some people deny it.

We like it when someone asks us how our day was and how we’re feeling because it matters to them. We love it when this person pecks us on the cheek and makes us the subject of their desires because it makes us feel wanted and adored. We revel in the fact that there is someone out there who is more than willing to trudge through mud, climb every mountain, and cross every ocean for us — metaphorically-speaking, of course.

In short, we get attached because this person makes us feel ridiculously good.

But, maybe love is beyond attachment and maybe attachment is what I’ve only experienced before and that makes me selfish because I would only see how it benefits me.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s because I’ve been focusing too much on the qualities that make them seemingly immaculate and turn a blind eye towards what stains and besmirches my illusion of them. Yeah, maybe that’s it. Too long have I conceived pieces and poems about what makes someone beautiful — no, this is not a reference to a One Direction song.

Maybe it’s about time I look at the other qualities. Maybe it’s about time I focus on the ugly.

Maybe it’s about time I see someone at their lowest point.

I want to see you without make-up on and in your sweats and that old shirt with the hole in the shoulder you relegate only to laundry day. I want to see you during your bad days, when nothing seems to be going right for you and it puts you in a terrible mood which I must suffer for. I want to see you in all your insecurities; those qualities that you endlessly drone on about in our conversations and what you ask me about, hoping for a denial of said insecurity.

But what I really want to do is to see you at your worst; that extremity where you are at the lowest of the low, where other people would not exactly stick around to see you in that state. It may only be a moment or it may last for a significant amount of time but what all I want is for me to be there.

No, I will not be repulsed by you nor shun you.

In fact, I want to look into your eyes and gaze upon your imperfections and insecurities and realize that I have never seen such beauty in something so imperfect and tell you that everything is going to be okay. I want to be the one to pick you up and carry you through the flames of your trials and tribulations because I want to, unbound by my convictions or principles. I want to forget about how those flames will raze me with their blazing tongues and keep in mind that I’m shielding you and I will take comfort and strength in that because you are all that matters to me.

Maybe love is about losing yourself in someone else and having no regard for your well-being because simply seeing that person smile and be happy makes you want to be the reason for it, no matter what the cost.

Yeah, maybe that’s what love is. But then again, I really don’t know.

But I’m hoping that I will soon find out.