A Love Letter to Love
The truth is that I’ve tried to write this post in so many forms, always drafted as if I know what I’m saying—as if I could forge certainty from precarity like straw into gold. Not long ago, I told my best friend that the next time I fall in love, it would be the one. I’d settle for nothing but clarity (as a matter of practicality). I wouldn’t survive another heartbreak. I didn’t have it in me.
Taken on the night I learned that layered relationships can exist in beautiful, uncomplicated, non-painful ways—though I didn’t realize it until months later.
In my defence, that’s how most life lessons go: you fumble around, get hurt, learn, and get it right. You come away with answers, but I’m beginning to think that love is an exception. Loving is a novelty every time, and so is heartbreak. Two months ago, I sat on my bed and listened to a friend mourn the day after she was dumped, repeating the same script we know by heart—"I didn’t see it coming, maybe if we’d given it more time”—like she was the first person to ever feel that pain. The thing is, those feelings are brand new. They’re wildly different every time.
I thought I understood love well enough to write a manual, but then some guy left his bag unzipped in my room one night. I moved it to the floor, and a guitar pick fell into my palm, opening up feelings I never knew existed. I couldn’t justify it. The present was hazy let alone the future; I had nothing to go on but the longing for our time to last a little longer. What a foolish thing to bet your whole heart on, but then again, what else do you bet?
My mother, ever the pragmatist, taught me to love a little less. I guarded my heart; it’s the only thing I’ve ever regretted doing. No heartbreak has ever rivalled wishing you’d given more. I learned that at fifteen, when I told someone I liked them to their face on the schoolyard. It took three and a half years to work up the courage, and I came away shattered but somehow larger and much more me.
It still takes everything to voice those words. Sometimes, I choke on “I love you”, and it comes out as “can I make you dinner?” instead. Falling in love will never be a safe choice, despite every safeguard. Healthy communication, boundary-setting, emotional awareness runs through my body like muscle memory. I had the privilege of being loved in the safety of an 8-year relationship that lasted from high school through university and beyond. Our love was so vast it stuns me that I didn’t crack the code on foolproof love—that somehow, there’s more I don’t know.
Taken on the night I acknowledged my sexuality—after years of dismissal.
My best friend said to me recently on the phone, “maybe love is so much more expansive than what we thought a year ago.” What a beautiful way to phrase this world-shaking precarity, the realization of how little I knew. That’s what vulnerability does: it opens—me, when I believed I’d nothing more to give; and futures blooming like new worlds with each person you let in, despite any guarantee.
I needed to know that falling in love takes no prerequisites—that it can be fleeting, nurturing, anchored in a lake at sunset or a glance across the table over hot pot—no less valid or life-changing, regardless of the form it takes. I need it, because I’ve realized I can’t promise much else. My life is constantly moving, my career teetering on the edge of what could be anything, anywhere. I love my work too much to let it go. I love my present too much to wish for anything different.
Isn’t that risk, that excessive profusion, reality’s keynote? I’ll admit I’ve never been one for restraint. It hasn’t always paid off, but I spent too long blaming myself for loving more. The harm wasn’t caused by loving. It’s possible to grow without hardening.
Acceptance came slowly. It took me two years to understand that this won’t be the last time, but I’m willing to live with that anyway. What else can I do? There’s no waiting for certainty in flux, and no illusion of power is worth the price of those butterflies.
The night this guy left his bag in my room, and I held an unexpected guitar pick in my hand sometime after midnight, I felt the absolute beauty of a stranger coming into your life and proving to be exactly who you thought they were—not just in one moment but in all the changes that followed. When drinks and meeting after dark turned into wandering bookstores and making detours to the pharmacy for emergency meds, maybe that’s the only thing we can bet on. Maybe that’s enough.