On Confessing One’s Love for Another

She tells me she loves me, and she might as well have dropped a guillotine on my neck; chopped me in two, head in a bucket. There is something about not being able to accept love from another, though I'm unsure of what that something is. There's something about all that blood on the stage while the crowd cheers on.

She tells me she loves me, and I cry. Lord, do I ever cry. I tell her, love is my servant, I tell her, I am Icarus in love, I tell her, honey-lotus, I am falling. Still, I cannot stand to utter a word.

Blame it on lust, fabrication, blame it on the realization that love is not a one way street. Blame it on the toxicity of past relationships, or immaturity.

I can touch her I can feel her I can love her but I cannot say it aloud.

Say it and I'm paralyzed. Say it and I'm fifteen all over again; fifteen and there's blood ribboning into the bath water, fifteen and this is what I'm leaving behind, fifteen and simply saying that should be enough of a visualization. Two years have passed. Four years have passed. I hunger, I eat, I cannot speak. Speaking is existing, speaking is vulnerabillity, it is them having a power over you, heart in hands, lifted above your head, just out of reach.

And the pain will ease soon; I will learn to accept it, as whole as an apple. I will learn to bite down into the sugary sweetness, drain it to its core, and without questioning whether or not it may be posioned.

This is love this is life I am living I am loving and that is growth in itself.