Caterpillars

All my life I’ve been taught that to love is to try.  And in order to try you must perform, give, step up. You mustn’t fail and if you do fail, you must try to re-earn that person’s love.  Love is a measure, it is a price, a prize won by action, one awaiting disappointment, a snarky sneer in a corner of defeat.

I have done this to myself my whole life.  This idea of misunderstanding love has hurt me more than just about anything else.  It’s a wad of gum that gets stuck inside, pulling every which way until it is my very core.  Rationally, I can tell myself this is not pure love, emotionally, I can’t get myself to believe that I don’t have to fight to prove I am worth loving.  

My body struggles with physical pain and within all of that, I have separated it from the rest of myself.  It has been incredibly damaging to the way I respond to physical sensations. The space I have left for myself to say ‘no’ is inch worthy, and the pressure placed to show up is substantial.  

Face to the cold bathroom tiles, sweat running down my chin, hands gripping the bottom of a porcelain bowl.  You must show up.  

This idea of feeling completely damaged and broken when my body collapses, knowing that love is care and care responds with: it is okay.  Those words are so hard coming out of my heart, spoken to myself, yet flow so naturally to others.  

I am a nurse.  I reassure patients all the time that their pain is justified, that they should never apologize to me for it--their tears, their groans, their “babiness”—I’m not a person who wants their apologies, I want their honesty.  

If my heart was entirely foreign to me and someone placed it in a box on a table--told me her story--I wonder if I would melt, what I would say, how I would feel.  I hope differently than I do now, with this heart living inside me. And I hope I would love that heart differently than I do now, more fully, more gracefully, more gently.  Because honestly, love holds no measure, it holds no weight or binding agreement, it has no definition and every definition. It is the purest thing you will touch, the most gentle.  It is for everyone and found in everyone. It does not decrease and it is not earned or matched. & it is the farthest thing from crippling.