Poetry, Art, Life

Sometimes I have a hard time telling the truth. Actually I think it’s more of a problem saying it. For four very long years I hardly ever told the truth. It was the only way to keep peace in our house. I think the biggest lie I ever told was “I love you.” I did, but not in the way he wanted me to. The rest of it was little lies, shadings of the truth if you will. “Yes, of course I’m happy with you, yes we have a good marriage” kind of lies.

Now, a little more then 2 years after my marriage ended, I’ve found it physically hurts me to not tell the truth. My throat closes up and the muscles start to hurt, and I find myself wanting to go to the woods and just scream my bloody head off. I think I lived it for so long that I want everything to be as real as possible. No falseness, no hiding, no being nice. So I just don’t say anything. And my throat still hurts.

The hardest thing to say is I love you. It’s easy to say to my kids, and have them say it to me. It’s like the meaning of life when we say it to each other. “I love you” is such a simple little phrase that can just roll off your tongue in a heartbeat even when you don’t mean it to. But to say it to another person? That’s hard to even think about without my whole body locking tight with tension. Now I don’t want to say it unless I mean it with everything in me, and yet when I do it feels like I’m saying “here is my heart, I’m open to you, and you have the power in your hand to hurt me terribly.” I know on a certain emotional level that it also gives the power to heal and to make me feel like the most cherished person on the planet, and yet I find myself waiting for the pendulum to swing the other way.

Isn’t love supposed to hurt? Doesn’t that seem to be the lesson? Maybe.
Set deep within my brain is a tiny kernel of self, locked away, in case it has to come out and save me from myself again. Except this time I don’t know if it can.

But more then all that I want someone to love me for who I am, not the image they want to build me into or think I should fit in. Why can’t I throw myself at the world in all my screwed up glory, and have someone say “Yes, I love you, even when you have to jump up and down and scream at the sky.” It’s like that special part of who we are that makes us so different form everyone else, is the one part that sets everyone back and makes them look at us askance. What is wrong with us, that we can’t find the one person who completes the lost part and wants for all that we are.

~written several years ago when I found myself afraid to say I love you, so I wrote this out and left it for him to find so he could understand.~