I've never been good at receiving other people's love. Every time someone says "I love you" it seems like a mistake. I hear those words and I become hard, like something in a frozen garden, curling brown at the edges. I think they must not see the dark pieces of me, gumming up the rotten machinery in my heart. I think they don't know how to love properly, they're using the words wrong, they're trying to manipulate me or when they look at me they see a reflection of what they want to see. I'm Venus that they gaze at through a telescope. They think I'm talented and they equate that with loving me. I'm a pretty woman giving someone affection and they must be lonely. A thousand and one reasons of why I'm not worthy of love or affection that I overanalyze until they break apart and I am left feeling justified that yes, it's not real, and I am unworthy.
I cried thinking about this while I was at the park today with the puppies, who I love, and I'm thinking about the first time I saw him, who I also love, after I moved back to Austin, at the airport. I'm wearing thigh high socks and a mini-skirt that I wore on a plane all night and it's only 8 A.M when I arrive and I feel new light pushing its way inside of me when I see him standing by the pillar near the baggage claim and in those moments I don't analyze the reasons why I love. I don't stress with the mental battles or try to justify to myself why this is wrong, or what I've done to deserve or not deserve it. I just love. I just feel it pouring out of me like a new kind of element. It's lighter than hydrogen but at the same time it's heavy, it doesn't float but sticks to my skin and sticks to my throat and it suffuses me. I'm not just warm, I'm boiling. I'm alive in a new way so that the breath has to shift through the feeling.
It's not up to me to say whether or not someone else loves me, or whether or not I deserve it or whether or not it's real. I don't need to know their justification of why they love or what they see in me when most days I only see something pulsing and rotten. I just have to be comfortable with the fact that they see -something- inside of me that touches something inside of them, and they call that love, and that's okay. It's not something that gets calculated with a complicated formula. You just know it, and you feel it, and it sticks to everything that you do. We can have that. We get to have all of that.