Love me Tender, Love me long…

For my Babba, who has taught me the grace , peace and humility found in patience.

We grow like caterpillars, our metamorphosis is delicate, beautiful and yet so incredibly dark and lonely, yet even the slightest help will most certainly cripple us beyond rehabilitation. I look back on it now, on how I have inadvertently shed everything I called mine, everything I mistakenly called sacred. It’s both unnerving and magical because for so long i would find love and think it better than the last, think each heartache worse than the last. Yet none truly superceded the other. Each was the highest possible level of pain that Caterpillar could possibly feel. The love was as deep as I could possibly take it.

Yet there in what I thought was the heartache of all heartaches, in that dark place where I had been convinced that I was unlovable in the sense of a life partner, when I had been convinced that I was shards of broken glass and I would harm anyone who dared to bring me close. There in that space when I had been made to believe my divine energy was dark and malicious, made to believe it was something made up entirely of darkness, in my darkness that is where he found me. I’d love to say he loved me into seeing the light but he didnt. He sat there in my darkness with me and made no mention of a light that he knew I couldn’t see. He said he found my darkness enlightening because he got to see the ugliest parts of me before he ever even saw beauty. And just like clockwork I cut him when i felt he tried to put me back together.

He bled, but he didnt stop. I realized he wasnt trying to fix me. There was nothing to fix. He knew that before I did that’s why he sat in that darkness with me. What I assumed was darkness was just me refusing to open my eyes. We were surrounded by life, by night and then by day. A perfect balance of both.
What had once been marked as unclean and vile he viewed and precious and divine. What had been labeled as broken glass he labeled a mosaic like puzzle. One that could be put together whichever way I saw fit. In that moment, with that understanding i understood love. I understood the ugliness that comes with it. The lack of perfection that comes with it. He made me feel the need for a deeper sense of honesty, not the kind that demands to know who Boy A is or what you’re doing. The kind that makes you want to show all your scars and expose your demons. Willingly, without fear. One that makes you see reality as the most beautiful thing and as the most imperfect view.

As I sat there in what I perceived as darkness, his love made me want to open my eyes and see. See what kind of human could love like this, could love me like this. And as I opened my eyes there he was. This hulking brute of a man, sitting in his own abyss of darkness. I realized he was incredibly flawed and he felt just as unworthy as I did, yet somehow he still managed to love me holistically. I too sat in his darkness until he could open his eyes.
This selfless act, taught me about a different kind of love. A grounding less demanding love. One that communicates through service and honesty. And when my mom transitioned from this world into the next, it was this love, that became my biggest security blanket. Perhaps that’s a story for a different day.