To The One Who Helped Me Love Again

You came along at such an unexpected time. That time everyone tells you will eventually come, but you never truly believe will. When you’re still reminiscing through the old photos of you and the one who decided to walk out the door, trying painfully to push them out of your consciousness. When you go home with tequila on your breath more nights than not, because it still doesn’t sting as much as the painful memories do. When you think you are irreparably broken. When no amount of glue, or duct tape, or comforting words from your friends ever seem to be enough to make you feel whole. And when that kind of pain cuts deeper than any knife can, isn’t that what we all want? To feel a little more whole and a little less broken?

And then in some sort of cosmic intervention, there you were.

There you were, and I asked myself a million times how our paths couldn’t have crossed before. How someone like you had been hidden away from me for so long. I quickly decided it was because something as good as you wasn’t supposed to be experienced right away, as I would have needed more time to make my mistakes and have my heart broken before I could be truly ready for you. One look at you, and somehow I knew your smile would ruin me, and it was the beginning of the end of life as I had known it in my past. A life that felt like a blur of meaningless instances from one to the next, now had significance again.

Suddenly, I found myself smiling just a little more for no reason, wondering what you were doing in that exact moment I was sitting and thinking of you. Laughing out loud at your witty and sarcastic comebacks, in a way that I almost forgot I still could. Deliberating in my own mind how something could actually feel this good again. I wanted to dive head first into a love with you that consumed me, and the way you carefully took your time was hard for the impatient person in me to understand in that moment. You made me remember just how blissful and heavenly that feeling of falling for someone was, and how something so good just shouldn’t be rushed. You got to know me, cautiously yet vigilantly. At times you even felt too good to be true.

But there you were, bravely deciding you wouldn’t run, even though every fiber of your being reminded you how terrifying it was to open yourself up to the possibility that I could destroy you — the way someone else once did. I understand that. I was terrified, too. But you stayed, while I tirelessly worked to pick up all the shattered pieces of my soul and put them back together.

I think the reason people feel broken is because when love is lost, a part of us really does break. Like a part of our brain being deprived of oxygen, we find it hard to breathe, hard to get out of bed in the morning, hard to make meaning in what we used to. And then something or someone comes along, and injects a shot of lightning into our lifeless souls, and slowly but surely, we wake from that dream. We learn how to put one foot in front of the other, and see the significance in the smallest of joys. The broken parts of us get the fixing they need. And you did that for me.

Sometimes the light within us dims. And then by fate or chance, or maybe even luck, someone like you shows me that that light can burn bright once again. So thank you for fixing me. Thank you for fixing what I thought was permanently broken. Thank you for not running away when you found me damaged and less than complete. Thank you for reminding me what it feels like to be whole. You may never know how much you truly saved me. But I hope that every day I offer you my mended heart, as dented and bruised as it may be, you know that it’s yours. It’s the most precious gift I could ever give you. And maybe the light that now shines bright in me will help yours burn a little brighter too.