A Love Letter You Should Read To Your Heart

Dearest heart,

I apologize for all the times I’ve blamed you for decisions you helped me make with your best intentions.

Your ability to look beyond glaring flaws in people is not a shortcoming, it’s a gift. Your tendency to say yes to things that could go terribly wrong is not carelessness, it’s passion. Your willingness for fifth chances is not weakness, it’s love.

I am teaching myself to understand the space where you come from. I am learning to acknowledge and respect you, but to meditate on if some of what you ask me to do is a risk that’s better not taken, or an opportunity worth exploring.

You are vulnerable and completely alright with showing that to people. I’m sorry I impose expectations on your vulnerability. I expect others to understand us, to return the sentiment, to hold us in those moments of raw exposure and not allow the pain in the world to infect you. That’s not what you want.

You just want me to dance to your beat. But I complicate this natural dance into choreographed movements that I can’t remember the steps to. I corrupt the purity of what you give me.

I am learning to listen to your call. I am learning to identify the days that you want me to be all of you. I am learning to hold you gently in my palm when you want to be exposed, to not expect anyone else to be doing that for us.

I come to you hungry for answers about the future — what will happen with me, who I will grow into, where I will be in a decade, where the love of my life is. I don’t know why I expect you to know these things, or why I hurt you when you don’t.

You cannot tell me about the future, but you can show me how to live till I get there.

I am now paying heed to what you have to tell me when I ask these questions, how you guide me in a language made of binaries, movement and stillness, and all your answers that are some combination of the two.

I’m learning to see you before I see others. I’m learning to tell apart your different cries, the ones of sorrow, of hurt, of regret, of loneliness, and of guilt. I’m learning to nourish you, so that you have fruit for me to pluck when I am hungry. I’m learning to stop tossing you between the highest pedestal and the lowest pit. I am learning to befriend you.

I know that it will mostly be you leading us along this sojourn. But for the times when I do not listen to you and take a different route, I need you to trust me. I need you to follow me. I need you to be there with me. Because I am nothing worth being without you.

You are the most powerful, brave and fierce part who I am. You are the most wonderful part of who I am.

I love because of you and right now, I want you to know that I love you.