Goddamn Lonely Love

I remember when Brad and I had first met.

One night he looked at me and said, "I'm hard to love."

I told him I had been told the same.

So he laid himself bare with me.

Past.

Victories.

Mistakes.

Everything he felt he was.

Everything he regretted.

Bare bones.

Those beautiful, bare bones.

"I don't know why I feel I can push my boundaries with you.

You need to know it all."

So he told me.

And I told him.

I told him of my stubbornness.

How I knew what I wanted in life.

How everything has always been a battle but no matter what it took I would dig in and refuse to let go.

I'm rough.

And tumble.

While my friends are talking skin care routines I joke that mine consists of dipping my face underwater when I wash my hair.

I play hockey.

I smoke when I drink.

I love wine on the weekends (though no more...sleeping pills make me steer clear of that now).

How most of my best friends are guys.

There is always dirt under my fingernails.

I chew them.

I swear a lot.

I'll fight you when a Pens game is on.

I am fiercely loyal to those I love.

Though those people are few and far between.

I rarely trust.

I don't sleep.

And for so long I've felt so broken.

I had felt so broken that I could not love before.

I never could find the way to do it.

Nothing ever felt right though I went through the motions.

My heart has always been guarded by concrete walls and I could never figure out why everyone seemed capable of love but I could never feel that way.

Broken.

Like there were no parts of me that were not broken in my body and mind and nothing fit together to make a complete human capable of love.

And he understood it.

In him I found the part that brought all of those broken pieces into one complete whole and finally, just finally, the walls came down.

We never fought.

Don't get me wrong, we had disagreements.

But those resulted in one of us saying we needed to talk and when we did we laid out what was bothering us and asked how we could make a plan to fix it.

And we did.

There was nothing that could not be fixed.

We could ask if the other needed space.

We could ask if the other needed to talk.

We could ask if the other simply needed a long hug that would help the stresses of our busy week go away.

On the first night we spent together that's what he did.

We laid our wings on the table and he reached out for a long hug.

And we stayed there until everything melded together and was whole again.

We had both paid our dues and now it was time to know what it was like to find happiness and contentment.

We found it easily.

Not once did he ever say there was a single thing I needed to change.

For once, this person who wanted me in his life didn't want to change one single thing about me.

It was never about change, it was how we fit together and made it all work.

For the first time in my life I could be happy being me and never once did I feel inadequate, wrong or broken.

And every mistake he told me he made only made him the person he was and that was who I wanted.

We fit.

I'm really struggling with missing that piece.

The one that completed me and made me feel whole, loved, appreciated and like there wasn't a single thing wrong with me after all.

My broken brain, my broken spirit, all of the things I had always told were not who a woman should be - he made me feel like every one of those pieces was loved.

It's so lonely without him.

I am missing my glue.

My soul.

My heart.

And for those years, though fleeting, I had finally known who I was and was comfortable in that skin.

Now I don't know who I am anymore.

I'm a mess.

I put one foot in front of the other but nothing goes forward.

Everything is stuck.

And I miss that feeling of acceptance and love.

He may have laid all of those past mistakes on the table and he may have also felt broken and hard to love.

But loving him was the easiest thing I have ever had to do.