I love him.
I say that first because it’s true and because everything after this line is going to sound like it’s arguing with that, and it’s not.
It’s not.
I fell for him through his own words. What was a stranger’s post I stumbled on became my heart’s song. Just a boy’s writing late at night, fingers sore, half laughing at himself, reminding himself that he liked who he was. Saying to some unknown person “you already have my love, want it or not.” He wrote his own vows before he even knew who he was writing them to.
That was me. That’s how I fell. Not for a stranger. For him, before the world got its hands on him and shame settled deeper.
So when I say I don’t know how to reach him now, I don’t mean I’m looking for a different man. I’m not saying I don’t know how to change him to be what I need now. I mean I’m looking for the person who already promised this. He said it first. I just showed up and believed it.
He’s stuck with me through so much. I want to stick for him, too. But wanting to stick isn’t the same as being able to stay exactly like this… in a home where I did the work of healing alone, and he’s still holding the blueprint of who I used to be.
I’m not asking him to become someone new. I’m asking the same man who once said “I want to keep being in love with you no matter,” to remember he already said that. That it wasn’t conditional. That it was never take it or leave it.
Maybe the vows weren’t wrong. Maybe we just stopped speaking them out loud to each other in the years they were most important. Maybe we just couldn’t find the words as they became deeper and what we knew them to be fell away.
I don’t want to burn the house down. I don’t want to just move on. I want to live beside him and still love him without having to disappear again just to keep the peace. I don’t want either of us to be gone… I just want to be allowed to see him and know he has seen me.
So how do I hand him his own words back without the shame voices screaming the second it gets hard? How do I ask that boy who wrote those words, now grown, now known, now finally taking the mask off, to remember them? How do I ask them if he still means them? And how do I get him to talk to me like that now that he knows who I am?
I don’t know yet. But I know this. This isn’t the end just because it stopped being the beginning.
Maybe it’s the part where I remind him he already wrote the words. Now we just have to learn how to speak them again, out loud, to each other, as the people we actually are today.
Maybe this is where forever begins… with another post:
SELF-REALIZATIONS (twenty years later, from her side of the bed)
I like myself. That took decades to write and believe and I’m not apologizing for how long it took. I spent years thinking my body, my mind, my whole self was something to manage instead of something to love. I’m through with being over-conscious about existing. If you can’t handle the full weight of who I am now, that’s not mine to fix anymore.
I used to be over-critical of myself before I ever got the chance to be critical of anyone else. I’d write myself off before other people got the chance to. Bad grammar in my own voice, bad timing in my own healing, I’d trash it before it even got heard. I’m done doing that. I need to hear my own ideas out loud before I decide they don’t count.
I don’t challenge my mind the way I used to want to. I used to think about becoming someone. Now I think about staying someone, staying myself, while everything around me asks me to shrink back down. That’s what I aspire to now. Not more, just true. Trust me, that’s gonna keep changing.
I want to love my husband. This one’s been around a long time for me, too. I’ve talked to people over the years, at work, in therapy, in my own head at 2am, and heard plenty of stories about what people settle for in their relationships. And I refuse to guess that love isn’t there. It is here. I know it is. But I don’t want us to be two people who kind of have to stay together and pretend the hard parts don’t exist.
I want it to be, “I did the healing and I still choose you. I connect with you on a level that survived the unmasking. I may not always like where we are right now, but on that deeper level I know we can get somewhere true if we’re both willing to walk there.” That’s not take it or leave it, either. That’s, “I already gave you my love, and I’m not asking for it back, I’m asking you to actually receive it now, as who you are from who I’ve become.” That’s harmony we haven’t built yet, but I still believe it’s possible.
The day I recognize this love as forever, the real kind that we both brought into this marriage to give to each other, is the day we’re both seen and neither of us has to perform for it. I want that for me. I want it for him too, whoever he’s willing to become. I want to love my husband.
Finally, I want to be true to myself more than ever. I want to stop conforming to a version of love that asks me to be smaller, quieter, more agreeable, more grateful for less. I’m not everyone else who stayed silent. I’m Stephanie. I’m allowed to be specific about what I need. Some of what I’m letting go of was noble once. Most of it was just survival dressed up as devotion. Anyways, my hands are shaking a little writing this. Moving on…
Starflake/
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