I Love That You Don’t Love Me Yet

It’s not our time yet. Not the time for us to slip and fall into each other. Not the time for our words to stumble before finding rhythm, talking over one another in the gentle nervousness of new beginnings.

You don’t love me yet. And I enjoy this.

I enjoy how careful you are when you speak to me. How each text, each phone call, each smile in my direction is calculated and rehearsed. You want to shine with perfection. You want to seem like you are this person without flaws, brilliant and bright in the sun. You are afraid to reveal your layers, to expose your skin. You are timid and hesitant, patient and careful.

And I love this.

I love how you aren’t wild with emotion. I love how you are taking things slow. I love how you are living as if our worlds are not dependent upon one another. Because they’re not.

I enjoy that smile that stretches across your face when you’re at work, the way you’ve always found yourself running from one thing to the next, so busy, too busy for me. But I don’t mind.

I love knowing that you have a world outside of me. I love seeing that there is so much of you I have yet to discover, so much of you that’s still strange and unknown.

You don’t love me, and I love that. You haven’t decided that I’m worth all the stars in your universe; instead, you’re just content to be with me, to hold my hand, to talk about our silly, mundane little lives that are specks in this giant map of the world.

You don’t love me. You love your life. You love the person you are, you love the things that you do, you love this world and your place in it, and frankly, that makes me start falling for you even harder.

You are your own self, independent of me, independent of the love we may one day create between us, hot and vivid like fire.

I love that.

When the time comes, we will learn each other slowly; we will become love in a way that’s gentle and soft like waves in a tide pool. We will learn who we are when we are together, when our lives consist of more than ourselves.

We will be ready, then. Ready to let each other in, ready to compromise, ready to fit this new relationship into the busyness of who we are and what we’re doing.

But it’s not the time yet.

Right now, we are not love. Right now you are you and I am me. Right now we are just two souls bumping into one another, feeling each other out, talking with pauses and hesitations and skipped heartbeats.

Right now we are questioning.
Right now we are wondering.

Right now we are sparking, and one day we’ll catch fire.