The Fear Of Losing The Soulmate You Never Thought You’d Find

I’ve always thought of myself as a work in progress. Once I solve a problem that lives inside my bones, it seems like another break instantly occurs. I’m not sure I’ll finish fixing myself before I die, and that’s why I have always been afraid of attaching my soul to another.

A real, functioning, worthwhile relationship cannot exist if one half of it isn’t whole. I am not whole. There are a lot of equations to solve within myself before I can start offering solutions to someone else. However, like most things in life, relationships often fall in front of me before I am ready for them. I’m always just walking along, looking at every crack in the sidewalk and anticipating the next turn I will have to take when someone just drops right into my path. The first few times this happened, I admit that I selfishly stepped over the person and let them follow me along wherever I was going. I knew they weren’t headed in the same direction, so I didn’t really see a point in waiting for them to catch up.

This style of loving never led to anything extraordinary or life changing or even worth taking up words in this sentence, and I am just fine with that. I didn’t see anyone or anything else around me, I was oblivious to anything except my own fucked up map I was trying to navigate.

Last year, someone changed all of that.

A boy fell not in front of me, or behind me, but into me. He stopped me in my tracks. This boy shook every part of me and made me feel like I wasn’t a work in progress, but already a masterpiece. He saw my incomplete parts as something beautiful, and he found intrigue in my insecurity. He made me think I didn’t have anywhere else to go but here, and I had already arrived at wherever it was I had been walking towards.

He is brilliant and beautiful. He is full of life and open to possibility. He isn’t afraid, he isn’t static, he is everything I’ve never had before. Back to the problem, and the break in my bones, back to where we started-I am not sure I can make up a part of his whole. I still am so unsure about myself and what makes me who I am; when you pluck away the things I like, erase the title that my day job gives me, peel back the people and things I love-what is left? I don’t think I have the raw magic that he does, and I am afraid once the distractions of my descriptors are gone, he will see that I’m really nothing special. I think he saw a spark in me when we met, but what if that will never set him on fire?

I’m not a gypsy. I’m full of fear. I’m no artist or adventurer. I’m worrisome and skeptical. I’m terrified that the new things in our life will soon become familiar; our apartment, new jobs, the feeling of love so swollen in us now will shrivel away soon enough. Even though he says he is right here with me, my heart feels heavy and like it is trying to warn me that he won’t be here forever. I hate not knowing if this is some story I have written in my head or if this feeling is the realest thing I have ever known. I don’t know what I will do if he leaves, because he took away my sense of direction so long ago.

I trusted that I had finally arrived wherever I was supposed to be going, if that isn’t true I might never be able to find my way again.