On Loving You

You are my broccoli; I have loved you since I first tasted the green genius that was succulent and wholesome, filled with life. I loved every bit down to the juices that flew from and flavoured the rest of my plate. How could something so good for you be...so good. When I beheld you I knew, one day I would marry a man like that. He may be gangly now but one day his world will grow out of it bounds, he will be a great scientist, a marvellous inventor, a future pioneer and I will be in awe of him and his greatness. But at 19 all I wanted were chemical reactions and proverbial fireworks, having being cursed to have loved and lost but not learned anything from the experience. So I never seriously considered you for my present, you were my future hope.

When opportunity finally presented itself I knew the instant that you asked me out what it would mean if I went down that road. I sat myself down and had to tell myself that you were not the one I should punish for the tough breaks I got. You were not to blame for my brokenness and I couldn’t in good conscious allow myself to fall in love with you if I wasn’t prepared to be committed. I told myself to be wary and to not play with you for my sake because I honestly believed that I finally had a chance at the love that I had always wanted. The love that I needed. I fashioned you clean, stainless, and incapable of hurting me. Perhaps it was unfair of me to project such grandeur on someone that I didn’t know. I had just thought that after having picked the right person, a person who was sincere with their intentions, I had won.

You were overly accommodating, I felt overly entitled, took for granted my own wisdom to have finally decided to pilot the ship of my life. I don’t remember getting much out of that. I remember that there were moments where I had been truly happy but what I remember in vivid detail was the fights and how much it hurt watching all the things that I thought would not happen to me when I was finally with someone that was loving, attentive, accommodating...those little tiny failures, took away from the image that I had of you. I found out that my knight in shining armour had seen war, had murdered and my heart bled as if I had been struck by that warring sword. A  simple conversation about toilet paper turned into mayhem.

Three years later I wondered how even after all the disappointment I never abandoned the image I had of that future you and compared it to the man I now had an opportunity to know. It dawned on me then that because of my insistence at holding up that banner in my heart, I forewent the funny you, the adventurous you, the you that dreamt the largest dreams I could ever imagine and saw them as achievable. I never navigated your emotional plains to try and understand what I communicated to you when I said the things that I said and only saw it from my point of view,.You were careless with your words, almost as if in defending yourself from my unwarranted attacks you actively chose to hurt me. You were blind to any progress I made in trying to understand you better. You dismissed my reason, something that I counted as the height of disrespect. I understood that most of our problems related to ineffective communication but I underrated what not addressing the root cause would do. I had hoped, after all our time together, to have been able to stand proudly beside you and take on this wondrous world.

For the first time though in perhaps ever, I see you and from hence forward I will not squander my love in aimless wanderings. I will nurture it ad cherish it and expend it abundantly on showing you through my eyes what life is all about. You are no longer my knight but a stranger that I invited in my home (because I had heard you came from a good family) and shared many meals with, and after enquiring about your past I felt optimistic that when the time came I might invite you to stay but that would depend entirely on whether or not you chose to be yourself through and through and have me love you for it.