What It Feels Like To Love Someone Who’s Emotionally Unavailable
By Laura Eason
You know that feeling when you need to stretch out your body because the electricity running through your veins is making you restless? Or when you just want to go somewhere and scream at the top of your lungs where no one else can hear you?
That’s how it feels for me to love you. It’s not giddy or fun, it’s suffocating and frustrating. I make excuses for you and waste my time making you a priority.
I wait in the parking lot of your apartment complex texting you to make sure it’s okay for me to come up. I make plans and squeeze you in around them. I sacrifice my sanity to give you the time of day.
What do you do for me?
I am nothing but a floating feather passing you by on a summer day; beautiful to look at, but always fleeting and never there to stay. Something pretty to look at, something soft to touch. Something you can let the wind carry away when you’re bored of it.
Shouldn’t love be effortless? Shouldn’t you be excited to see me? You say you love me, yet I only feel your lust.
You touch my skin like you’re desperate to feel something. You grip so tight like you want to have something worth holding on to. You barge into my apartment and smudge my lipstick with your feverish kisses.
Am I just an outlet for you? Somewhere you can recharge? Somewhere you can empty yourself out?
I am so much more than you can see.
I am a fire burning bright in the dead of night. I am the sea crashing on the shore. I am the moon glowing in the darkness. I am a storm bringing lightening and rain.
I am a woman worthy of love, a woman who deserves to be appreciated, desired, and adored.
If only you could look past yourself and see me, you would know the pain I’ve put myself through holding on to you in your weakest moments.
It feels like a rock sitting on my chest.
I dream of someone who breathes fresh air into my lungs, someone who makes me laugh when I want to cry, someone who surprises me, someone who never misses a moment to let me know how loved I am, a man who feels lucky that I am his.
I am worn, depleted, and weary.
You cannot keep taking pieces of me and not replacing them with pieces of you. You cannot use me as a house you only sleep in, but don’t maintain. You cannot plant a flower within me and then forget to water it.
If you love me, then show me. If you care, then make an effort.
If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to cut you off like the rotting leaves of a rose bush.