Open, Heaven

Perhaps I was so steeped in love, had woven its mythologies through my mind for so long, that when it arrived in reality I could not recognise it. Love confused me, bewildered me, tore me apart, but not because it was not love, but because I thought it was a fake, some unreal version that did not accord with the love I had dreamt alone.

It was like walking through a folk song that afternoon — the blackbirds and the thrushes, the sweetness of the flowers, the boy I loved, and who might even love me, waiting for me between the trees.

It was a paradox, really – I was afraid of men, but I only felt really safe if one of them was on my side.

This is what I wanted - this independence - but when it was given to me, I felt isolated and cast out, riddled with guilt. It was one of those strange contradictions: I wanted to be on my own, but the moment I was on my own, I wanted to be called back.

As I watched them around school, I saw that all their bravado, their crudeness, sometimes their violence, dissipated when they were alone. That was the thing that broke my heart, that made them so perfect to me. I saw that they were soft, and this softness made my heart sore, because I knew it was a private thing, an intimate thing that only showed itself when they were unwatched, when they felt safe. Their tenderness was a world I was locked out of, and all I wanted was to be let inside.

I had come to find love, its vision, its company, to be changed by it... knowing that it would deplete me as much as it sustained, that it would torture me as much as it made life... worth living.

i'm scared that i'll always need someone. i'm not afraid of being alone, i'm afraid that i can't be myself when i'm alone.

Perhaps I was so steeped in love, woven its mythologies through my mind for so long, that when it arrived in reality I could not recognize it.

[I] felt abject in my hiddenness, my shadow-life, and because I had spent so long just watching, never acting, I was terrified of exposing my desire. I thought it would be shocking, that it would tear right through the fabric of the world and everyone would see it and know me and everyone would know that I was not a harmless thing, an undesiring thing, but that I had a fire insurgent within me, a buried fire that had been stoked furiously for so long that it would rage through the world if for a moment I let it out.