​If I let go of the rope, what if there’s nothing on the other side?

I felt like I was slowly disappearing where certainty should have been, like I was swallowing myself to keep him whole. That’s love I weaponized against myself until I finally admitted it. I could win the Olympics with the level of mental gymnastics I was doing, desperately holding onto a rope that tore harder the tighter I gripped it.

Even the purest hearts have thorns, and I would bleed a thousand times over if it meant loving you was enough to keep me from losing myself. Desperately hoping you’d commit to a life with me, like I was suffocating ,unable to come up for air until you said the words I’d longed to hear. Silently hoping, wishing, praying I’d be enough.

That was my misconception.

Wrapped in past hurt and trauma like a gift under explosive weight, carried by the vast depth of my own ocean. Quieting the storm inside me until I felt the thorns sharpen. Now I sit with the oceans salt stinging my wounds, tiny needles gnashing away at the flesh of my heart.

Oh, how painfully beautiful it is to love but even more beautiful is grieving something I had the privilege of knowing at all. To have been in the presence of a love like this.