I Love Everything But Myself

I love widely, intently, and fiercely. I always have. I'm so capable of love except for mustering a sense of it for myself. What seeps into every aspect of others' lives is a water that is in drought in every aspect of my life. I love everything but myself.

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I love the way the rain dances in cobwebs like an unwritten poem, an unfinished, never-ending love story between the rain and the silk. I love the leaves in Autumn... tinges of sunburnt red and dawn orange melting into the centre from the outskirts and the fringes. I love how everything is in harmony in nature, even when at the same time it's all in dissonance: the seasons, the different animals, the sounds those species call one another with. I love that perfection is a thing that doesn't exist. But then I see myself and the rain starts, the poem ends, the bitterness seeps into the warmth, and everything as I've known it stops at me, falls apart, breaks, shatters, its melancholy unfolds, sadness ripens, and fruitfulness rots. I love everything, everything but myself.

I love it when the sun warms me from the outside in, the rays making my lonely heart feel as though it finally bears companionship and understanding. I love it when I hear somebody I love say my name, in the way that it is not just a word but a being, an essence, in which they know and in which they adore. I love it when you hold my hand and the world fades away into nothing but you and me... us. I love it when I see your face first thing in the morning, and suddenly I don’t feel alone with the world anymore, as everything unknown falls, aligned, into one special place. I love that when our eyes meet, the dreading day before me suddenly seems perfectly beautiful, hopeful, and safe. And then I see my reflection in the mirror, and suddenly all that there is to know now is a plaguing world of hatefulness. I hate what I see before me - my aura, my body, my face, my soul - a broken melody of a song nobody can sing except the melancholic, dark, uninspired parts within me that allow for my punctured soul to continue to cave in, acting as an injury to my wounded beliefs about myself that only know how to bleed forevermore.

I love you when you bat your long eyelashes, unexpectantly, purely, lovingly, not to get what you want but to find my being in the calling wind with your devotion for me, your trust in me, and your faith in me. I love you when you are everything and more to me, when I find myself falling for you, and when I find the parts of myself that I've buried in you. I want to call your name off the cliffs, professing my unrequited love for you, the fact that there is not a thing I wouldn't do for you, a song I wouldn't love to sing to you, and a phrase I wouldn't love to recite to you. I love when we spend time together, you and I, in a room filled with others, some we know and some we don't, yet I feel alone with you. It feels free, rather than tainted, strong rather than self-conscious, and brand new rather than expectant. I love every moment like this with you because every moment with you feels brand new, shiny, and golden, the sunlight glistening upon your cherry-lipped smile, and a drip of black coffee stained upon your upper lip. Do I love to tell you, do I love to watch you not know at all, do I love to wipe it for you with the tip of my fingernail, or do I love it the most when none of it matters except for us, you and I? But I love nothing less than when I see myself sitting next to you and I watch my body fly into the wind, leaving you, missing you, disappearing again like a deeply saddening magic trick, with every trick up its sleeve, out to hurt the world, and not to thrill it. Its charm is only evil as it swallows me whole, in one gulp, gone, nada, zilch, empty, and zero. I fade into death, life draining from me, darkness decaying me, and the city we're in forgetting me as quickly as it began to know us. But there's no us anymore because if I cannot love myself in this moment, I cannot hold on enough to love you. I'm gone, you're gone, and then we're gone, as quickly as we fell into place. I love everything, everything from us to we, but not me, not myself.

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I hold onto the good things, not because they last but because I know bad like the back of my hand, it seeping into my life like a constant drip, and so I know that good is a rare commodity, one implicitly hard to find. I know that everything good is eventually something I’ll learn to love because it’s hard for me to draw away from the attraction of goodness when it feels so bad to see yourself as eternally unlovable.

Kisses,

COS x