I have rose petals on my mind. They are lined up, as if placed mindfully by one person who cared. This person cares that the rose petals were all lined up, each touching, following each other to shore on their path to me. They are floating in the warm ocean toward me, direction swerving as the waves transmute the ocean.

These rose petals have something. They are love, ashore in my life. I am the ocean. I am floating now. This is all that needs to be said.

It is obvious that I have a big heart, and love only men who don’t know how to love yet wear an armor with a heart on it to disguise their brick walls they quickly build when real love—mine—comes along.

That doesn’t diminish my heart. So, Valentine’s Day, please don’t tell me to Go Hug Yourself or imagine your romantic adventures pictured on your billboards. (I plan to eat your chocolate samples and take a nap.)

You, the one I devote myself to, are expecting me to be someone… you’re waiting for it to happen, as if it’s up to me to turn you on by unleashing all of who I am. But in order for me to be all things, I need to do it in the right order. You need to Be Someone too. I need to first get to know your kisses, the look in your eye, the way you hold yourself, how to come closer to or move farther away when you feel overwhelmed, how to know if you’re overwhelmed or actually don’t know how to ask for me to come closer.

If you were here now in front of me, looking into me, I would tell you about my heart. I would tell you about its secret wish that I promised to fall in love and never leave it. It’s hiding alone, willing me to see its angles and curves first that blinded you and me. It is pure, speaking only in silence, waiting for us to argue it away or brush it aside as something else so that then it is what’s left, and believed. It won’t wait now — staring at us, smiling from within, feeling liberated. People will say we are in love.

I want to capture it in a story to tell myself until you are here, and I can practice my endearment speaking not away from you, but into you; I’m not afraid anymore to be real, to be spoken, to be inside you.

You are beautiful to me in ways I knew early on. I wanted to wait though until I felt you inside, until I loved you in the most precious way—from within me. I wanted to wait until the anxiousness and weeds that covered the truth dwindled and blew away, so that the complication wouldn’t ruin us in our sensitive ways, wounded hearts wild and uncompromising.

Caged for a while, with new freedom to be anyone it chooses, it is now volatile and unconditional. It’s safe when loved and alive yet destructive, needing to feel its pain and the process of knowing it’s okay—that love is okay—as I learn to trust my bruises.

When I write to you now, I feel safe finally, as if I have given myself permission (or you have) to love you inside you now, no armor needed. I love you, I do.

© r.e.l. 2/3/15

Published on Rebelle Society 2.13.15

Image source: tumbler (unknown)