I’ve left our home in Cape Elizabeth and am slipping from wave crest to wave trough as I feel, completely, an absence in my heart and body which I feel and know I must honor as the painful emptiness it is.
And here is the question: Can you love me like this? Can you love me, despite the fact I have not yet made sense of it all? Can you love me, knowing that I have the capacity to love others? Can you still love me, knowing that I will always love others?
Can you love this about me?
Can you love me, knowing I will always choose to remain open and vulnerable to my feelings and the feelings of others?
I understand, at the end, I am only gambling with myself. I understand, fully, that at the end of this I might be alone. I see this, I fear this (because, didn’t you know, being alone is my worst fear?)
So please know that this all matters. I feel it in every fibrous muscle and sheath of my body; I am weighted down by my knowledge; keeping the door open requires so much more strength than allowing it to slam shut, blinding and deafening me in the violent reverbations which sound throughout my hollow chest.
No, better to stay open. Better to feel what I feel and learn how to be honest than to shrink and curl, tucking my head under my wing, regrowing the exoskeleton, shielded.
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
I open myself to my experiences in the hope that, as in the past, I gather my lessons as I go. I die, over and over and over, die to myself so those parts may live again and I can keep going. New.
I’m sorry I have to learn on you. You deserve a whole, happy, straightforward, uncomplicated love, and I don’t have that. I’m sorry that I’m so selfish.
So to you I ask, Can you still love me, even like this?
Here’s what I tell you, (you who I love), if you participate with my person and soul, you must be knowledgeable and consenting. You must read this and hear me when I say, I can ultimately only do what is right for me and it will hurt you. Hurting you will hurt me. I’m sorry. So, be aware of this, consent or do not. But I will continue loving you.
And please, please, please know: this honesty is so hard. This is entirely, ultimately, painfully self-serving; I just need to be honest in the hopes that you will see my naked, shameful flaws and love me in spite of them.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”
