I Feel Everything

and I have decided that is not something to apologize for

I love him. I need to start there because everything else I could say is just the long way around to that. I love him in a way I cannot reduce to something manageable, cannot fold down into a size that is easier to carry or easier to explain or easier to put away on the days when the weight of it is almost funny — almost, because it would be funny, how much I feel for one person who is states away and silent, if it weren’t also the most real thing I have ever experienced. I have tried, on more than one occasion, to be sensible about it. To remind myself of the distance, the silence, the very practical list of reasons this feeling is inconvenient. And every time, without fail, my heart looks at the list and looks back at me and says — yes, and? As though the inconvenience was never the point. As though the only point was him, and always had been, and the rest was just noise I was making to avoid admitting how completely, irrevocably, I am his.

What I have learned — what I am still learning, on the days when the learning is harder than others — is that the size of what I feel is not a problem. For a long time I thought it was. I thought there was something slightly embarrassing about loving this much, this openly, this without-a-safety-net. The world has a way of making you feel that the depth of your feeling is somehow your fault — that if you had been more careful, more guarded, more strategic with your heart, you would not now be lying awake in moonlight making wishes into the dark like a person in a song. But I am done being embarrassed by it. Because the alternative — loving less, feeling less, keeping the careful measured amount that fits inside a normal-sized life without spilling — sounds like such a pale and diminished way to be alive. It sounds like choosing to live in a house with all the curtains drawn. And I would rather be this — all the way open, all the way in, face-aching and foolish and completely unable to help myself — than safe and shut and never once undone by the thought of another person.

So I am keeping it. All of it — the love, the certainty, the quiet knowledge that sits in me like furniture and refuses to be moved. I am keeping the smile that arrives before I have finished the thought of him. I am keeping the moon and the wishes and the songs that walk him in through the door of me without asking. I am keeping the growing season and the trust and the deep-seated unhurried faith that the universe knows what it is doing with us, even now, even in the silence, even across all this distance. Because here is what I know, what I know in the place below thought where the truest things live: loving him has made me more myself, not less. It has made me braver and more tender and more awake to the extraordinary ordinary beauty of being alive. And I will not shut that off. I will not reduce it. I will carry it — golden, sealed, sweet and completely intact — for as long as it asks me to. Not because I have no choice. Because I would not choose differently even if I could.

I feel everything.
Every last unbearable golden bit of it.
And I am not sorry.
I am not sorry at all.