I realized I loved him on a chilly morning in October.

The evidence was in my eyes as I looked in the mirror. There, I saw a fantastic sadness. The sort of profound despair that manifests in a person’s face after time, when their hollowed cheekbones and raccoon eyes draw sidelong glances in public. Our time together was a sweet torture, and it had forced me to that place. I was grappling with a terrible decision; and the evidence of it was beginning to become apparent.

Despite the circumstances, that realization was the best thing to happen in a long time. Feeling torn at a fork in the road was better than feeling nothing at all, as if I were walking a tightrope between loss and luck. “The trick,” as they say in Lawrence of Arabia, “is not minding that it hurts.” To know heartbreak, one must first know love. Such was my predicament. He had been right to call me jaded, and I was. I had seen a glimpse of humanity’s underbelly, a place so terrible that I had locked it away from memory, one that haunted me from afar.

Before that chilly morning in October, the desires to know him—what he was thinking, and the way in which he thought—had been tolerable. How terrible it was, my mind unable to wander without dreams of what could be. I had never been one to indulge in reveries of the impossible. Yet, each time I approached abandonment, I would remember the tastelessness of a life without our time together— riddled with small moments, so often overlooked— when the earth stood still in awe of our rapport. Without those moments with him, I would be alone. It felt wrong to leave, and that was the humble fact that kept me from ending our story before it even began.
~

Imagine this:

Drinking five cups of coffee, or the glint of a particularly stunning sunrise at dawn. Ascending to the peak of a thrill ride before falling and losing all control, your stomach plummeting beneath you, the wind rushing through your hair. A glimpse of presents on Christmas morning, back when it was a surprise, or when you drove faster than the speed limit for the first time. As a child, the unparalleled fear of being lost in a crowd. The security that came with being sick, in knowing that your mother would bring hot tea and kisses for your fevered cheeks. The taste of freedom as you first rode a bicycle without help.

That was the way falling in love with him felt.

~

I often found myself torn between wanting a moment to pass and being completely happy, content to live in the space of that instance forever. There were two reasons for this. The first, because I knew that soon I would look back and realize the finite subsistence of that moment and how beautiful it was. I was happy and content with the conversation we’d held and knew that the days of those conversations were numbered, that each and every moment I spent having them should be cherished, as an exhausted man would treasure sleep. I didn’t want it to end because I knew that it would, and I wanted it to end because I knew it would, also. How else are things supposed to hold great value, if not for their inevitable limits?

The other reason I felt torn was because of The Fear. Not just any fear either—but an irrational, unyielding terror that grew worse as I began to care. It was as though I was being pushed against a cliff, given no choice but to jump, or face the horror of what loomed in my past. I often wondered if I would ever be able to overcome such an irrational anxiety. If so, would this new person instead steer me past that cliff, away from the treacherous chasms of my past, and into calm waters?

I didn't know, but the question always lingered on the peripheries of my mind, ready to spring at any moment. The thought of him, eyes narrowed, drilling into the silence of the space between us, is what reminded me most of all. Was it terror I felt, at the thought? I knew that my fear would return when he approached; leave me quivering like a finely tuned longbow, expecting the smarting whiplash of a memory to come. He made me feel again, and because of that, a nebulous dread always came at the thought of what I may remember. Never justified, but there nonetheless, from a shattered past and splintered experiences at the cost of my youth.

It isn’t easy to say that relationships were meant to be selfless. To talk about how, if an indelible fear were to be the price of that selflessness, so be it, queue the panic. He was, after all, incredibly selfless—as I’d known from the beginning. At some point, I also knew that we were in love. Love, on paper, with a particular sort of revelation that only life-altering facts can have.

~

Sacrifice.

Sacrifice is what love really means, in one word. It is the moment when you realize that the world doesn’t revolve around how you feel, and that life has it’s own agenda. The potential for ultimate sacrifice of oneself is a terrible comprehension—and when it comes, you feel as though being hit by a train would’ve been easier. At first, everything is numb. Do not be tricked, however, because the hurt will set in soon after.

Anyone who has visited the corridors of despair knows that the numbness is a temporary anesthetic. When the real pain hits, it’s so much worse. Heartbreak is a systematic agony, which crashes over you in waves. In the beginning you might be able to grit your teeth and plow through it, but soon the sensation will strip at your nerves as a cold shower does. A day might pass, or two. But by the third night there is no denying the ache.
~

Maybe he didn’t see it yet, but I did. A world of possibility began at the wrought-iron gates that surrounded his new college campus, although what became more unsettling was the thought of how our conversations would surely dwindle along with the things that we had in common. College was, after all, another world. This school was perfect for him.

Each day I was on the bleeding edge of ending things. I knew that the right course of action, the responsible thing, would be to have aborted our relationship instead of allowing it to drag forward into an inevitable demise. Because the longer we spoke, and the harder I fell, the more painful I knew it would be when I’d have to make things end. I told myself it wasn't betrayal. That, "If you loved someone enough, you'd let them go," to make the decision more tolerable.

I would have taken the pain of this heartbreak for the both of us, without a second thought—if only to have kept him from feeling the crushing sense of inevitability, and sorrow that came with doing so. This must be love, I’d realized, as I’d looked at my reflection once more, This is the face of a person in love. Only love can cause such suffering.




Everything would have worked out so well. My plans for the future and the misery I would endure over this short period of happiness. Why, then, did my fear leave me when I needed it most, when I relied upon it to have helped me make the most awful decision possible?

Cultured fear is like the ocean. It drifts out of our lives in a whisper, but never ceases to return with the promise of a titanic crash against the beaches of reason. Some have dealt with these currents of dismay more than others, and you can see the erosion it has caused within them if you look closely. I was afraid of people, and my fright was like a riptide—the brush of a stranger's hand whilst walking through a crowd, or the particular heat in someone's eyes, as they grew angry. These were the things that made me afraid, and dragged me asunder with astounding strength. Such simple things, easy enough to overlook, if one weren't endeavoring otherwise. The Fear and I were old associates. We knew how to live in a world with one another, compensating in certain areas, and relying on the lassitude that would accompany such terror to dull the reality of a situation.

Then, I found myself in his arms.

The familiar tendrils of dread made me feel as if I were drowning—I was drowning, and I didn't want to stand silently and accept it. I did not want to make peace with The Fear as I stood, wrapped in his embrace, nor did I want to compromise. I wanted it to be his moment, our moment, and it had to be right. Fear made it wrong.

Apprehension of people is an innate thing, and it can be the worst feeling in the world when you realize that you, too, are a person. A part of you is lost to that constant unease, an inner peace and security that once provided the necessary building blocks of reason. I had lost that many years ago, and in its place was the deep chasm of my past. I thought that if I could have just one second, enough time to breathe, I would be able to ignore the rift in my emotions and hold the memories at bay. I believed it was something I had to fight within myself, to challenge and annihilate, for the fleeting reward of physicality. But I was wrong.

He took my hand.

There was a moment of quiet. He began talking softly, breath warm against my hair, and I could hear his heartbeat. I didn't know how, but when he spoke it was calming. He was saying something about my fingers, how they looked delicate. He’d reached around to where my hands were balled into fists behind his back, and begun to massage them gently. He slowly pulled each finger away from the clenched deathgrip, feeling them with his own, murmuring about how soft they were. It made something I'd thought was strong inside myself break, those words. I wanted him to see, to understand, what he was doing. My fear began to dissipate. Only a person who had lived with fear, been hardened by it, could understand how in that moment I felt sane again. Like a long-lost part of myself had been fitted into place with an audible snap.

I remember that as the instant when I fell in love. It was like nothing else. His gentle whispers, and the way he ran his other hand through my hair with a sort of reverence. I felt safe in his arms. I felt safe, with him.

It was every sentiment, wrapped into one. It was the opposite of feeling nothing. It was feeling everything. I felt whole, with him, in a way that someone who has never experienced love cannot truly understand. I came to a sudden understanding of why men went to war over that feeling, or how those who had watched their beloved spouse die could, themselves, expire so quickly in the weeks following. Love was terrifying. It was selfless, and exhilarating. Love was cruel in its blindness, but it was a beautiful thing. Humans were made for that feeling, of being in love.

We were only people, after all.