You Couldn’t Possibly Love Me

You couldn’t possibly love me because you don’t know me.

You know the surface of me. You’ve heard bits about the past and you’ve accepted the future, but you don’t know the depths of the waters that I have treaded and the sleepless nights that I have had. You’ve come into my life at the perfect point, when all is well and when trouble has subsided. But you haven’t seen or know about the times when I was at my lowest, and those are the times you should love most.

I question your idea of love, because if you’ve only scratched the surface of my life, do you really understand what love is? You say you don’t care about the people I have been with, but shouldn’t you? Every person you meet changes you, defines you, creates the person you are today. Shouldn’t you want to know the people who have hurt me and loved me before? I feel guilty when you say you love me because I feel like it’s a lie to let you.

Before you, there were so many, many terrible times I had gone through. You hardly know about them. You’ve asked, and I’ve answered. I’ve never gone into detail. I’m afraid that if I go into detail, your perception of me will be different. It will be guarded, like the way someone is after the person they love has slept with someone else. I feel like you’ll be more careful and cautious because you’ll be afraid that what you say will hurt me, because it’s happened before. My past becomes an unspeakable subject. How can you love that?

You’ve never really seen me broken. You’ve seen me tired, you’ve seen me stressed out, you’ve seen me worn down. You’ve never truly seen me at my worst. You didn’t know me in college, when I was a horrendous person, when I did terrible things to people that I was close to. You didn’t know me when I was younger, when I spent every day fighting a mental battle to stay alive. You don’t know anything about me. Yet you say you love me.

Trying to comprehend why you love me is a puzzle I sift through in my mind everyday. Love shouldn’t be like this. I shouldn’t have to wonder why you love me when I know in the back of my head, it’s because you’ve seen a well-refined version of me, one that has taken over two decades to create. Maybe you fall in love too easily, and I’m just one of many people you’ve simply fallen in love with. But maybe your love is real, and it will stay that way, even as you learn more about the trouble I’ve created.

But love can be sad, and I believe that you’re still riding the peak of the rollercoaster of love—the part when you still get insanely excited about how new someone is to you, and it feels like there’s a world of opportunity to grow with someone. That’s you. And maybe you haven’t quite come down from that rollercoaster yet, and you’ve mistaken it as love. Because the hardest part about loving someone is knowing in the back of your mind that feelings don’t last forever, and you eventually have to learn to accept that into the way you love someone. Because maybe once you learn more about me, you won’t love me anymore. People grow apart, and I think we will too.

But maybe I’m crazy to not understand love. Does anyone actually understand love? I think you’re crazy for loving me. Love is such a deep emotion, and how could anyone feel that for me? You would have to be crazy to love someone who still has trouble loving herself. But maybe one day, I’ll love me as much as you do.