You don't have to be healed to be ready for love

What falling in love in the worst health year of my life taught me:: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 3rd 2024

Dear soft heart,

I feel her warm body velcro itself to my back, that is how we usually fall asleep at night. Sometimes, when I am only wearing underwear, or I am in shorts, she takes her pants off too, wordlessly, just so more of our skin can touch each other’s.

I write her notes each time she comes over to greet her. I use the pens that correspond to her most favorite colors.

I memorize her favorite snacks and I buy them. I notice that she eats the peanut butter cup in small increments. She eats a bite and then puts it back in the fridge. I realize I quite like this about her – the way she doses pleasure, how she stops when she is satisfied and reaches for more when she isn’t. And how it doesn’t seem complicated for her. I admire it both because it seems easy now and because I know it was hard earned.

We go to an art exhibit outside. There are tables at a cafe there that are lined with wild flowers someone must have picked that morning. We each get an iced tea that a woman with long brown hair serves us. We recognize that there is baklava here that is from the market, a man who shares my birthday sells them. We make up a story that the cafe owner is the lover of my birthday twin. We are pleased. I watch her walk to me from the counter. She is wearing jeans and a blue tank top. Her eyes are the same color as mine. Did we do that on purpose?

When I tell her I love her at first, it is by accident. She is going to shower, and I am going down the stairs, we pass each other, and I say, “I love you.” Oh no, I realize, my thought went down to my mouth before I could stop it. She stops moving. Her hot gaze lands on me in the twilight tinted air, the moon is the only light on. For a moment, I feel like I weigh a thousand pounds. I am suddenly dried cement. And then, to my relief, the thing that lets me breathe again arrives. I transform immediately into water that glistens under the sun’s watchful rays. She says, “I love you too.” And all I can manage to say is, “You do?” whilst throwing my hands up in the air, sort of like I am a clumsy orchestra leader. She confirms, and then I go sit in bed starring at the wall for twenty-minutes until she is done her shower.

“You didn’t mean to say that, did you?”

“No,” I confess.

“But I did…mean it.”

We say it again to each other, very much meaning to.

We go to the grocery store and I overbuy picnic goods. I have a basket at home that is perfect for this occasion. I put everything on the counter as she calls a friend. I start to organize and pack things into pyrex containers and when she is done her conversation, she makes bacon in the pan. It is the first time I’ve had any in years, she makes our club sandwiches with the thick strips of crispy fat meat hugging tomato and avocado and lettuce and turkey breast. I get the basket, proud that I am using it for an actual picnic, and I pack some coconut water and we go to the park at golden hour and somehow, we get no mosquito bites. I make her laugh by making a bit out of what her internet search history must be. She starts to name other people and I do theirs as well. She laughs so hard, she must skip a few breaths.

We sit on the sectional couch outside, the one I got a few years ago, when it was the height of the pandemic and all I could think about were couches in an escapist haze. She massages my feet. I ask her if she wants to go get ice cream. She says yes, and she drives us there, to the little ice cream shop that is filled with people on a perfect summer evening at 8:50 pm, when the sun has barely set, and she looks beautiful. We sing Taylor Swift songs and the windows are down, so the wind kisses the edge of our skin. We get raspberry and rose, and maple and walnut and vanilla coconut cones. We share them equally as we sit on an outdoor bench. We are each other’s as we lick through a mountain of the frozen sugary sap, until there is no more. We swing on a swing set I love at the park. I feel like I am a little kid and like I am a grown woman all at once.

We get into fights and we don’t know the other very well yet, and we assume the worse, it takes months to undo patterns. This is always the hardest part of a relationship; the beginning. That or the end. The middle is what I like the most. I dare think I hope there is no end here.

I get her zinnias and roses and I place them on her night table. I declutter a closet and make space for her. She befriends a deer in the yard. We go to the plant store.

We get coffees and teas many times. And quiches too. And we take long walks and talk about what we would do with the money if we won the lottery. I ask her to slow down on days I am not feeling well. She goes on runs in the morning and she makes the best eggs I’ve had since I’ve had my dad’s omelets. I make good curries.

We go paddle boating one perfectly sunny day, and we discover that she does not know how to tell the time it will take from one spot to another. I explain time blindness. She tells me she feels less alone in the world because I am here with her. I feel the same.

I like it when we watch TV and I lay on her chest and she holds my head and kisses my forehead. I like it when we kiss on bleachers looking out to an outdoor hockey arena that no one is playing on.

Once, in the parking lot of a hardware store, in the early morning of an October day, we talk about if she touches me too much. I say no. Our kisses become ours in a way that feels like there was never anyone else.

Another single time, she meets my grandfather and we sit on the swing in his front yard at the old age home. She figures out what he likes the most pretty quickly by looking around his apartment and talks to him about it.

The first months of our relationship I am just on the edge of full autistic burn out collapse. I think if I just rest a little, it’ll be fine. But it’s not fine. The summer ends, and she sees my first meltdown and shut down. My mom puts an ice pack on my vagus nerve, layers me with a weighted blanket, puts cold wash cloths on my feet. She knows what to do – she has been doing it secretly with me for months now, but now it’s getting so bad, I can’t even hide it.

“We just wait, it will pass” She tells her. And my girl does. But she is also scared, in new territories, unsure what to do, what to ask, how to help. And I cannot get the words from my brain to my mouth. I feel stuck behind a concrete wall. I want her to understand but I can’t communicate it. I wish she would just intuit it. She knows this and it drives us apart – makes us leave each other when neither of us wants that.

Teach me, she begs.

Know me, I plead.

Soon, I fall down the stairs and I am really sick for several months. I cannot get out of bed. Days feel like they become weeks. Weeks feel like months. Months feel like years. I am completely housebound. Gone are the summer nights of eating on a patio, purple sunset enveloping the edges of our bodies, bonded by kinship stitched up of inside jokes over farm to table hors d’oeuvres beneath our elbows.

In December, we break up. I am besides myself, sick now too with abandonment wounds and anger. A few short weeks later, an excruciating Christmas over, we’ve made it to January, and she is at the tattoo shop putting my favorite number on her body right on her ribcage, near her heart. I want to kiss it. And so I do.

For months, we learn each other, we make it up to each other, we blame each other too, sometimes it feels for the very same reasons. We watch all her favorite movies, childhood movies. I like getting to know her through what comforted her when she was little. I enjoy figuring out what it is about the movie she resonated to; what made her feel less alone.

Soon June comes once more, and we celebrate a year of this. Already? We say. It feels like it’s been a handful already, maybe a lifetime. And then it also feels like just a few short days.

There are birthdays, little gifts, more handwritten cards than either of us have ever received and flowers too. I lasso her friends and make them speak directly to a camera to answer questions about her to celebrate the fact that she loves us so well. I put it all together and we watch it on her birthday. She smiles in a way I’ve never seen her smile.

Summer relieves pressure. And we are in the park, having a picnic. We picked up some sandwiches from a deli. I brought a blanket and she lays it out for us to step onto. Before we do, we put our feet in the grass. I say, let’s ground a bit. We are coming to have a meal here after we’ve shuffled me from appointment to appointment. My injured body melts tension under her touch and her support. What do you feel, I wonder. We share. God, I am in love with her. There is a camp filled with kids there too, having lunch, and they run around us. One kid picks up a dog shit on a stick and chases their friends with it. I am horrified. “That kid is going to be such a fucking jackass.” She finds it a little funny. “No, they are just having fun and testing boundaries and limits, seeing what produces what, they’re learning”. How lovely to be different, to acquire new perspectives, to challenge your own thinking. She helps me be less sure, less rigid and therefore, more me. You can always change your mind.

When I am too tired, she washes my body in the shower for me. She learns to brush hair. She fills up the freezer. I ask her to bring the long chaise from the living room to the kitchen, so I can sit near her when she cooks. When she needs a cheerleader and a teammate and a dose of unwavering love, I am there. I am her biggest fan. I believe in her and I lift her to the skies where she belongs. Yet, she is the one who calls me angel.

When we can’t sleep at night, we press our skin together, or we facilitate parts work sessions. We praise each other and we are there for the big moments and the small ones too, no matter their flavor. We are learning to be partners.

When my papi dies, we lay in bed and I read her word for word everything I wrote to him in the letters I sent him to honor our love and his life. I cry before I am done the second one. When I look up at her, foreheads pressed against one another, only the blue light of my phone between us, I see her face is soaked with tears too.

Some say we need to be completely healed to be ready for love. After this year, I say, not if what you really want to be dealing with is love.