When I Am Not Enough

By

When I am not enough, tell me. Be loud. Be inconvenient. Ruin my good mood. Be so intensely shocking that I finally stop talking. Make me really listen to you. Be raw and emotional. Be uninhibited by the vulnerability of it.

Let’s get it all out on the table. Let’s air all of our grievances. Let’s break this silent spell that has slowly been enveloping us for a year.

Let’s tear apart all the unopened packages of fear, and sadness, and anger that have slowly piled up at our doorstep these few months. 

I want to embrace what we’ve been hiding. I want to feel something towards you. At the very least, I want to feel the full force of the pain and suffering we’ve caused one another.

I want to see the damage we’ve really been doing to each other, you know, the stuff we’ve been burying in the name of “happiness.” I want to feel unburdened by all of this, like we used to be when we were kids.



You see my love, the problem is that I was too inexperienced, and you were the opposite. I had never been faced with challenges in life, and you were all too versed in them. I thought I could handle you—no I was sure I could handle you. And you thought I could change you, soften you, and meld you into a better, kinder version of you.



But we were wrong darling. 

We started like a blazing fire.

Like the heavy tropical storms that rip through the streets of our love’s hometown: hot, intense, powerful, and inevitably….destructive.

Then we transitioned and quickly became that of romance novels: young people reveling in every conversation, every new experience, every shared moment that quickly become sacred. 

But when life showed us up, tried to teach us a lesson, tried to warn us about the reality of our love, we ignored all the signs. We were delinquent in taking care of ourselves.

We let our love blind us to all the apparent signs. You never saw the end coming. 

But I felt it. I felt the final storm.

I felt D-Day coming our way. I felt scared, and angry, and determined not to end up a statistic—another reference to failed example people throw into conversation about young love and why you shouldn’t even bother.

So I didn’t move. I stayed so eerily still, you didn’t even notice that I felt it.

Hoping that if I held my breath long enough, the storm would pass right over me.

Over us.