For sister-friends, brothers, cousins, daughters, sons, fathers, mothers, and people everywhere who’ve given up on love.
One day somebody’s going to walk in your life and love all those things they didn’t like about you. Your slick mouth, your sensitivity, your finesse, how you wear your hair, your passion, your fears, the tears you shed that dried on their own. They’re going to love the way love looks in your eyes.
At this moment, it may be too scary for you to believe, or even hope for something that you’re not sure exists anymore. You may think it won’t happen for you. You’ve tried that love thing two, three times too many. You’re grown now, you don’t believe in fairy tales. Reality’s blows to the heart a tough artifact to consume. You can’t muster the energy nor courage to give your heart the authority to know the joy of love again.
Perhaps, you’ve wrapped and buried your love perception in a person. That love rejected, lied, mistreated you, made you feel inadequate. Or maybe they just never made you a part of their world. You weren’t real, you had no effect. It’s possible your love was once whole and over time, circumstances too complicated to manage, it grew distant. Committed yourself inspite of everything your gut told you. Difficult to remember what life was like before you met his or hers version of love. Your love definition forever changed.
In your eyes.
The impossibility of love is just as uneasy to settle with as the possibility of love. Yet, somehow you’ve become undeserving. You don’t understand now, but rejection will save your life. The further you remove yourself from the person or the source of the pain, the further you move from heartbreak. And someday you’ll be able to forgive that unforgivable thing. You won’t focus on what you’ve lost, but the peace you’ve found. You’ll discard your past versions of love that told you, you weren’t worthy of more. There are behaviors you will relearn in order for you to receive the magnitude of the love that God has in store for you. Just don’t let that person that didn’t love you stop you from loving those that do or will.
In your eyes.
We’re all afraid that people will change. That they will walk away and change their minds about loving us. But, we have to become okay with knowing that’s a hazard in love. It will hurt and we’ll work through it. We can’t live in worry waiting for things to shift, because they will.
Every version of love transforms the way you love.
I know love to be another world where everything fades, staying up late and dancing till the sun peeks through the blinds in the morning, a conversation that only eyes know the words, a touch that rubs the pain and past away, a laugh that hadn’t escaped before, a love that doesn’t fight my insecurities, it wipes my tears and fears, it sees my darkness and doesn’t run, it reminds me it’s not over, it’s a confidence in my weaknesses, a provider, protector, listener, a beautiful part of myself I never knew existed or was missing.
It is my prayer for us that love’s embrace is not a fairytale, but the sweetest, rawest form of reality, staring back at us.
Love in your eyes.
Dominique Mack
