I have a pattern with men. The pattern is this: are you fucked up? Let me lick your wounds and feed you love and understanding and advice and then you can disappear until you need me again. There must be a way to be loyal and dependable without being taken for granted?

I know, I am responsible for this pattern but I fall into that victim feeling. That feeling of– I did something wrong, I deserve this, I am unworthy. As many times as I tell myself that it becomes true. I get spun in this illusion that my only option is to keep letting people in who will leave me, let them reinforce this idea that I am not someone to stick around for.

But it’s not true! I am a great friend and mother and I would make a great partner if given the opportunity. I can sometimes be beautiful and sensual and caring and witty and loving. I am flawed, as we all are but I do not have to only love people who are incapable of giving me what I need.

Stab me in the heart, face, back, neck, kidneys, over years and years I will take this and I will make excuses for it. I will be compassionate for your truth and your struggle and i will consider your mental health 10x more than I will consider my own.

The real truth?

HE, him, the multiple gentlemen who have built the pattern with me are brilliantly flawed and far more interesting than their alternatives–this is the narrative. They have shadows so wide and deep that they get lost in them and I follow them down and end up drowning.

As dark as they are they are brilliant, genius, awe-inspiring, radiant and my love is with equal parts admiration. But where is it reciprocated?

One, has never been so close to anyone. He hides and denies in his grey-beige life the warmest heart, a home-in-a-person– me and his mom know him the most so what does he do? He ghosts.

Another, he is like the sweet childhood I never had, a muse and gentle warmth, a hug, he drops away into an cement walled room. He is powered by freedom, he feels like the wind, and every time he is a phantom again I end up curled up crying wondering “why doesn’t he love me?” A most unintentional wounding repeats itself and each time I forget not to be surprised.

By no means the least, with the voice of mountains growing, the power of the new sun born every spring. He teaches me how to hold the biggest things with the gentlest of hands. He has led me to the most important thought discoveries. He feels like the edge of the universe buried deep within the earth. He appears when it suits him, he leaves whenever he can, and he hides brightly in my peripheral vision. When he leaves it is expected, his presence is the unexpected. An elusive spirit, I’ve often wondered if he is delusion constructed. 

All of this love, this reverence, is balanced by the crippling realization that not a single one of the men I have loved has ever been consistently there for me.

I have had to construct, in their absence, version of them in me. The title is the voice of one, the heart of the philosophy an -other, the syntax is a reflection of the rhythm of another. I have had to fill up those spaces. For 15, 13, 8 years I have plastered over those holes and kept on loving. I have worked on myself to be more understanding, truly, to love unconditionally.

How am I doing? What do I need at this time? A question to ask inwardly, no one is asking it for me.

“I love you, you’re not alone, everything is going to be alright.”

Always,

E