This Is What’s Holding Me Back From Loving You
By Brynn Taylor
Oh, do I want to love you. It would be so easy. With your charming smile and bedroom eyes, and all the promise that lies behind them, I could get lost in you for hours.
It’s so easy to love you. I feel a comfort to you that I haven’t felt with anyone in a long time, and I often mix love with comfort.
I should probably love you. I’ve done it so many times before, with men way worse and in no less time, but with you, I can fall slowly. With you, there is no rush in your voice and no pressure in my head telling me to stop; no timeline to adhere to, and no flags being waved.
You are what makes the others seem like nothing. You are what I’ve woken up in the middle of the night screaming for; the itch I’ve been scratching, leaving claw marks on my arms so deep that my skin bleeds. You are the epitome of sense and senseless, making it so easy to fall madly, but so easy to realize that I can not possibly be mad for wanting you.
I can tell you’ve been lusted after by many. You can probably tell it’s been the same for me so you make me feel like I’m not just a body to lust after. I wonder if we can base love on a foundation that unreliable.
It’s crossed my mind that people would be jealous of our love, but not as often as the thought of you and I drowning out the noise of what people think we should be, so we can just be together.
There are reasons I want to love you. There are reasons that even I can’t define, and reasons that some may define as shallow because although I want to love you beneath the surface, you are still the embodiment of the perfect man I’ve created in my mind.
But how can we look past the shallowness of what we are? It’s pure logic that you and I are a perfect match. I could make that argument without any adversity; a case so easily won that there would be no point in fighting it. You with your perfect smile, and me with a kind face, I can just hear the hallelujah chorus of praise, “What a beautiful couple.”
And here I am, fighting. Fighting with myself when no one is putting me on the witness stand because I can’t trust my mind to stop committing crimes against my heart. I can’t believe what is right and what is wrong, because oftentimes what felt right was pure fallacy. Often times, I’ve been fooled by what others see as good for society and a fool for believing in what is not good enough for myself.
You see, you may be good enough. In fact, I have no absolute reason to believe you are not. I could so totally love you because that is what every other girl wanted. I can love you because that is what nineteen-year-old me dreamed up in my head of what my future was going to look like. I could fall so madly in love with you, just because here you are, and because I placed myself on your radar and you latched on to me like all the men I’ve loved before you.
I can love you fearlessly, but the truth is I’m not as fearless as I seem. Maybe I was once, but I’ve grown tired of believing the truth that men paint for me instead of believing in the truths that I hold to be self-evident.
The truth is I’m afraid to be in love with you until you show me the truth about why you love me. Surely I can believe it’s because my heart is pure, and because I never want you to feel pain. Because I love so deeply that even the most insecure man will start to believe in himself, and I love so intensely that you will never even be acquainted with the fear that I may leave you.
I want you to believe in me, just as much as I should believe in you. I want to believe this is going where my heart imagines it can go because my head sees such immense possibility that there is no way I can see myself turning away from you.
But the truth that I am so afraid to admit is I can see you turning away from me. I can see you turning back because you think I’m too strong, or too weak, or too sensitive, or too aggressive. I can see you not believing in us as much as I believe in us because as often as I’ve tried to quiet my thoughts, I’ve reached a point where I start to assume the worst because the worst has proved itself to me. I’ve reached the point when my mind starts guessing, while my heart is stuck in an infinite loop of falling for every logical fallacy it can procure.
I want to love you, but the endless toll of lost love is holding me back. I’m afraid all I can do is look for the fear in those bedroom eyes, and wait for them to show me the reason you’ll start to walk away; I wait for them to show me the reason why I should have never believed in our love in the first place.