A Letter from Love
a balm
Dear Love,
What would you have me know about this heartbreak I’m in right now?
- Patrick
My Dear Sweet Luminescent Patrick,
Oh my love. Well here we are again. Crying. Shrouded in that all-too-familiar pain, that stab of rejection you’ve come to know so intimately during your 35 years. I’m so sorry. After a month of dating, Luis has said he doesn’t want a relationship with you. Reading that text this morning took your breath away, made your stomach lurch, and forced you to choke back tears while at work for several hours. I’m so so so sorry my precious boy. What a punch to the gut. I hate that for you. Your heartbreak is my heartbreak.
You come here asking what I want you to know right now. That, my friend, is at least the correct question. Which is the best first step. So many people would ask me to take their pain away, or make them feel better, or, most tragically, to make Luis have feelings for them. And I get that. I really do. But after 35 years in earth school, you’ve learned that’s not really how things work. We both know there is nothing I could say or do that will make any of those things happen. I am simply that which loves you beyond word and thought, time and space. I don’t bend the will of others. I cannot move your heart or even bind your wounds. I can only be. I can only love. So thank you for asking the right question.
There are some truths I want you to know right now. They are the only antidote to the hamster wheel of untruths you’re currently spinning on. Round and round you go, distorting reality and breaking your own heart ever more. Please step off the wheel, just for a moment, my love. Come. Be with me. Hear my words.
I promise not to offer platitudes or clichés. That’s not really my style. Nor is it yours. I won’t tell you that “this too shall pass” because, well, that’s not helpful. And that’s not what you came here seeking. Of course it’ll pass. You know it’ll pass. Eventually you’ll be fine. “Fine” being unattached or moved on or unemotional. My sweet Patrick, you have traveled the road to fine countless times. It is a pitifully well-worn path.
I also won’t tell you that the right person is out there waiting for you. I won’t tell you to keep putting yourself out there and one day he’ll magically appear. That’s not a promise I can make, my love. Even if it was, I know you well enough to know that hearing that will only make you roll your eyes and shut me out. Besides I am Unconditional Love, I have no business in forecasting the future. I’m here only to love the bones of you.
Deeply.
Fully.
Rapturously.
Unquestioningly.
In the here and the now.
Which brings me to the first thing that I want you to know. “The one” is not someone you will meet one day. Your Mr. Right, your person, your forever love is not out in some unknowable future. He is someone you already know. He is you. I realize that sounds like a cliché but know that it is true. You, my Patrick, are the great love of your life. If you loved yourself one one-millionth as much as I love you, you would see that. Again I can’t make promises about other people coming into your life. I can’t say for certain that you will find someone as equally attracted to you as you are to them who also wants to build a life with you. Perhaps it will happen, perhaps it won’t. But I can promise you will always have yourself. You are owned by none other than you. You are not a puzzle piece to be completed. That and my unceasing love for you are the only two bankable things in this world, my dearest. Rest assured.
The second thing I want you to know is that Luis and the heartbreak he has dealt you are gifts. And before you roll your eyes, hear me out. They are gifts meant to teach you. To remind you of things you once knew but have forgotten. For years now you’ve shuttered your heart away, put it under lock and key from romance. You’ve kept your interactions with men casual and superficial and guarded because you convinced yourself that real connection defied the laws of physics. For years you’ve said things so often that they became your truth. I’m a lone wolf. Men are trash. Dating is impossible. I will never find love. Over and over you claimed these. You owned them. What breaks my heart is how fervently you came to believe them. These wild untruths became your reality. But you are not a lone wolf, my love. You never were. You’re a social creature just like everyone else. You want love and affection in the most deeply human way. And that is not a source of shame or weakness. Dating is also not impossible. And good men do exist. Your brief time with Luis, who was good and even offered you kindness in your parting, proved some of this to be true.
Remember several weeks ago when you went on the single best date you’ve ever been on? It was the kind of connection that you, with a cynicism that’s grown on the crevasses of your heart like cobwebs, didn’t think was possible. Remember when you called Jen afterward in giddy excitement and got lost driving home? Remember the butterflies, the ease you felt in his presence, the screaming in the car afterward? The kiss?
That was a gift, my beautiful boy. An electrified gift. All of it. Your brief time with him was a reminder that such things, fireworks and excitement and happy meetings, are not only possible but they are possible for you. It was a spark to indicate that a little magic could happen, even if today wasn’t the day and this boy wouldn’t be the boy for long. It was a gift meant to crack open that hardened shell you’ve built up.
You buried your heart underneath those many layers of untruths long ago because you thought it was the safest thing to do. So please, oh please, be gentle with yourself as I say these words. You were attempting to protect a very very tender heart. A most fragile thing. That wall and mote of untruth you constructed around it acted as a shield. And for a while it did a damn good job. So bravo! For the last decade or so you prevented many of the heartbreaks that plagued your teens and early 20s. No one could break your heart if they couldn’t get to it. That shield was you loving yourself the best way you knew how.
Which brings me to the third thing I want you to know. Heartbreak is unavoidable. However, you do have some choice in which variety you get. Your way of being, with that fortress you hid behind, was simply a heartbreak of a different kind. It was the kind of a million little paper cuts of lonesomeness. Like the baby going out with the bath water, that armor prevented heartache and joy. It distanced you from dangerous men and the good ones. It left you impervious to the lows and the highs. You managed to avoid the sucker punch of pain with this strategy. But it was at the expense of connection and connectedness. In spite of all your cunning and tactics, heartbreak came for you nonetheless.
The fourth thing I want you to know is that heartbreak is not stupid and you are not stupid for feeling it. You are not stupid, period. But you feel really stupid right now. You keep smacking your forehead as though some idiot lives in there and needs punishment. How could you be so distraught after a just few dates in a few weeks? How could you get swept up like a child listening to a fairytale? How could you have gotten your hopes up so high so quickly? At one point you pictured a wedding and a future with this man? You started making up vows while driving? You watched yourself flutter around like the stereotype of a daft school girl. Surely you are more mature than this. More sensible. Surely you’re above excitement at this stage and this age. You think that being caught up the way you were is irrefutable proof of your stupidity.
Suddenly you’re back to 2006 weeping in Jessica A’s arms over Brian for the billionth time. In high school and in love for the first time at age 17. Everything felt bigger than big back then. Luis made you feel the same way just now. Or maybe it’s 2011 and you’re sobbing on the phone to Jessica M about a different Brian.* The whirlwind of that dysfunctional entanglement having turned you inside out. The feeling, minus the toxicity, eerily similar to what Luis did to you. But that’s something for 17-year-olds and 22-year-olds, right? Diving head first isn’t something that wisened 35-year-olds do.
But my love, my dearest one, this is not stupidity. None of it. It’s not a defect. It’s not a lack of brain cells or maturity or wisdom. This is one of your superpowers. For your entire life you’ve been able to throw yourself, body and soul, wholly into things - projects, ideas, plays, songs, causes, art, and people. That is a rarified gift. Sure you sometimes put the cart before the horse but when you give, you give fully. You dive in. The wholeness with which you show up is one of the ways people find you. It makes them want to show up a little more fully too. For themselves, for their own lives. That isn’t naivety, my Patrick. That’s wholeheartedness. And it is something most exalted.
The last thing I want you to know is the most important. So please hear me. Let these words wash over you. Open your heart to them. The great pulsating inky black monster lurking underneath all of this is that you believe you are unlovable. In your darkest moments you don’t just think you won’t find love but that you cannot even be loved. You believe, as much as you don’t want to, that parts of you are inherently incapable of being held and loved by another. Maybe it’s your belly and lack of abs or your voice or how loud you are or how gay you are or your lack of charm or your lack of talent or your lack of achievement or your lack of money or any number of things you think are “wrong,” but something about you will prevent a man from ever truly loving you. You fear that if you show up as yourself, they will have no choice but to reject you. Luis rejecting you, having seen you at your most relaxed, your most authentic, is proof.
My most beloved Patrick. My joy and my delight. My heart breaks with you knowing that monster is down there, rattling the floorboards, and that you spend so much energy keeping it at bay. It saddens me endlessly. I want to share in your tears during those dark sinking moments but, and I must be honest here, the absurdity of it won’t allow me. If anything I want to…laugh. Not because the monster is funny or your belief in it is funny. But because the very notion that any single atom of you is unlovable is the most ludicrous slice of bullshit I have ever heard. How could that possibly be?
So let me be abundantly clear and unquestionably firm. Your magnificence is not up for debate. The divinity within you cannot be negotiated or traded. Your heart’s sanctity is immutable. From before your existence I loved you. I love you right this very nanosecond. I will love you until the end of all that is. There is no part of you that I don’t relish in ecstasy over. The belly and the voice and the mind and the personality and the soul. That heady rush of elation and electricity Luis made you feel? I feel that for you tenfold, all day, every day. It is why I am.
Look at all the signs of my love in your life. Take a quick inventory of the love being offered to you by others. You are practically drowning in it, Patrick. Your family, your army of friends, your community. They love you in a way you will never fully know. People think about you so often it would leave you stunned. So many of them smile at the thought of you. Literally smile. They delight in your friendship and all the great many things that make you just precisely who you are. It’s an embarrassment of riches. And Birdie? That dog is the closest thing on earth to my brand of love. Remember when you got home from work today and melted into her? Remember when the hot tears flowed down your face while your chest tightened around that fistful of pain and your dog came to you? She got on your lap and put her head on your heart. In your sadness, her love for you didn’t waver for a single second.
So there you have it, my dear. The five things I wish for you to know right now, free of empty promises and limp sentiment, as you navigate the murky waters of pain. Remember that I, and these words, will never not be here. Whenever the pangs of rejection and loneliness hit, be it in the next 5 minutes or the next 5 years, whenever heartbreak rears back its head exposing razored teeth, there I’ll be. In the midst of longing and heartache, all you need to do is reach for me. Simply ask. I will be there to love you with the kind of love that levels mountains and ignites stars aflame. It is my sole purpose, my honor, and my delight.
Be well, my precious one.
- Love
*I think the lesson here being that Jessicas are amazing and Brians are not.