You Deserve A Love That Is Warm

You are 25 years old, lying down on your bedroom floor, on the Middle Eastern prayer rug your roommate brought back from Jordan. The air is cold. It is interesting how coldness stays still on your skin for a while before it enters your bones.

You think about the kind of love you’ve settled for. How it doesn’t feel warm anymore, if it ever did.

You think about the energy you’ve given to try to train a man to be intentional for you. To come home at a reasonable hour. To apologize when he hurts you.

The thoughts get so uncomfortable, you cannot be still with them. You want to squirm. You want to get off of the floor and occupy yourself with something. The room is closing in at an intensity that is hindering your breath, but you know: It is important to stay right here. It is important to feel this pain surge through me and hold it; let it transform something in me. Let it turn into words.

Tears come. Hot tears – too hot to be new. You know that they are coming from a place inside of you that has been on high-heat for weeks. This water has been boiling there for a while, steeping all of the emotions that you toss into it, and here it is, on your cheeks. It has come to warm your cold skin.

It has come to re-teach you what you have forgotten.

Love comes home at night. Love apologizes. Love listens before you beg through heavy sobs.

You deserve a love that is warm.