Don’t Make Me Fall In Love With You If You’re Not Planning To Stay

I was fine before I met you.

I’ve been a single mom for as long as I can remember. Being single is all I knew.

Showing up to parties and events solo, never bothered me. Going out to dinner and the movies with just me and my kids, making reservations for three: me and my two daughters, was the norm. Hauling twenty bags of groceries on one arm and a case of water on the other all while digging for my keys in my purse was light work. Taking out the maggot filled trash once a week never felt like a chore.

This was my life, for as long as I could remember and I didn’t know any other way nor wished for it to change.

Till I met you, that is.

All of a sudden my single life as I knew it for so long grew lonely, exhausting, and burdensome.

Now when I show up by myself to parties and events and my friends ask if I’m still single, it yanks at my heartstrings to have to answer “yes”.

When my daughters and I go out to dinner and the hostess asks, “Just the three of you tonight?”, I want to spit in her face for reminding me, yet again, that you won’t be joining us.

Now the groceries feel like cement blocks and I’m forced to take several trips lugging them from my trunk to my front door and the stench from the maggot infested garbage is all too much for me to bear.

So I have to ask you this, please don’t make me fall in love with you if you never planned to catch my fall.

Don’t make me wish to hold your hand walking into graduations, summer barbeques, and parties, showing you off to everyone I know if you’re always going to be off somewhere else doing your own thing, with people that don’t even know of my existence.

Don’t make me stay up all night on the phone with my best friend after every time you leave my house, telling her about the way you make me smile more than I have in years and in the same breath have to explain and make up excuses for why you have yet to invite me over to your place.

Don’t make me yearn to wake up next to you every morning kissing your perfectly sculpted lips, tasting your sweet morning breath in my mouth, if you’re going to run out before the sun rises.

Don’t make me itch to tell my daughters all about you because I am confident that you will be nothing less than the perfect male role model they need in their lives if the thought of meeting them never even crossed your mind.

Don’t make me picture you in my future plans if you’re never going to plan that future with me.

Don’t give me a glimpse of how perfect my life would be with you in it. Don’t show me just how hard being a single mom has been on me if you’re just going to sit back and watch me struggle. Don’t make me smile from ear to ear, don’t make me laugh till my belly cramps, don’t make me feel so loved that I feel completely fulfilled just so that you could walk away and leave me to continue living as a single mom.

Because now being single doesn’t befit me.

My single mom life is trying to escape into the shadows of my past to make room for my life with you. But I have to clench it with all my might and yank it back into existence because you never planned to catch my fall and I am still here alone.