Delusionally Yours,
For the first time in a long time, today I am just in pain. Words don’t feel like they are going to burst out of my body. No one will be receiving a string of texts from me today. There is no violence resting in my bones, nothing more than a few fist slams to the ground during a good cry exists in my spirit.
The last six months I have felt like an exposed nerve, reacting with full intensity to each speck of dust in the air that drifted past me. This morning as I write this, I’m honestly just so proud of myself for staying alive that the heartbreak I feel can’t even diminish my peace in moving forward.
You see, I did it again. For the third time in my life, I chose a beautiful, affluent, white man whose life has been so completely unimaginable compared to my existence. The memories of these men trying to convince me that I could enter their reality is so sweet to me, but taste bitter this morning. Jersey Ice Eyes sat with a rose, in the front lawn of my college home and explained to me that my thorns helped me survive, but they wouldn’t help me now that I’d been “picked”. As he spoke the words, I remember the feelings of disappointment. Another man pretending to sit with my past, but only focusing moving on, moving forward, forgetting.
Months are spent preparing each of my lovers for my condition. Flush with exaggeration, I tell the worst stories in hopes the gravity of my message will make it through. Yet it seems that no matter how many times you warn people that your body is volatile and frequently protects you without invitation — there is no adjustment in expectation or interactions between a “healthy partner” versus me.
And yet, the delusion they offer is so sweet that I haven’t found the strength to stop offering myself up. I have fallen in and out of love with so many sisters and mothers of lovers that I’m not sure my heart can do it anymore. The shame I feel as I realize that not once ounce of the data I shared made it beyond the ears of my lovers. Their families weren’t told. You didn’t turn to them while I was in and out of hospital. My partners suffer my existence alone despite my screaming for the world to know what is happening in my body. Tell everyone! Tell anyone! There are others like me, and other lovers battling their partner’s trauma. They destroy themselves with expectation that I will recover magically under their care and I spiral down into newer, deeper pits of shame as I realize that again, I fell in love with their delusion. A delusion I’ll never get to live in.
But if you have to remove the thorns from a rose to appreciate it — is it really the rose you appreciate,
or just its aesthetic?
As I sit this morning, weeping into the keyboard of this laptop, I know I have to accept that. I know there are people who love me despite my trauma, despite my volatile behavior in uncertainty, and maybe even because of the compassion and heart I have as a result of those. I know that the goal is to value yourself so highly that you never settle for someone who makes you feel less than, like you need to heal faster, or better, or sooner. I know that these requests are all signs of not being cared for in healthy and loving ways.
But goddamn it, do I want to be a part of their sweet delusions so fucking badly. And that is what brings me pain, today.
Delusionally Yours,
LL
