The Haunting in Dear love

Dear love,

It’s my default to say I’m sorry. Not because I’m Canadian but because I am so intrinsically interested in making you comfortable, the apology is first and foremost. Your feelings almost always matter more than my own. I would apologize for that but I am not sorry.

I wasn’t born this way. It was programmed into me one painful moment at a time. As voices rose and fear set in, the inclination to submit became intrinsic to me. It’s so much a part of who I am now I don’t even notice the inherent need to serve, to comply, to make it easier for you to be near me.

I love you, you know? Not in a passing way where I love all of humanity, but in a profound way where I value your existence on this earth and your life brings light into a world all too dark. In a full way, where I am cognizant that I do not know all of you yet, and I know I never will, but there’s a romance to that, isn’t there? To love someone you only know a piece of. But what a beautiful piece of you that you’ve shared with me!

I am grateful for you. In those moments when I say unfaltering that I believe in you? It’s because I do. Whole heartedly and unfaltering. I know you enough to see what beauty and potential and compassion and magnificence lives in your heart and it makes me want to weep for its grace. I believe in you, love. Completely. The same way I love you.

If I have been absent and if I have been too long away, please know that I have been living in a house haunting myself. My mental health negotiation, because it isn’t a war, has become a consuming experience as unwind who I am from who trauma has made me and try to find the person beneath the the ghost stories of who I’ve been told I am. It isn’t that I don’t love you anymore, it’s simply that I’m caught in a house trying to solve its mysteries so that I can emerge and remember how to breathe again.

But I’ve missed you, my friend. This journey is an isolating one, the house doesn’t have room for more than me, and so while I can find time now and again to sit at the window and share in your life with you, most of the time I must stay within and away. I simply don’t have enough in me to keep the windows open when the house itself wishes them shut.

There are so many times I wish I could bring myself to speak to you, to tell you the whispering strangeness taking root in my head, and to speak freely of the pain others have visited on me. This is perhaps my greatest struggle. To tell the ghosts to be quiet and to find a real living person to share this struggle with. Yet the ghosts keep me quiet, locked in conversations with them. I hope you understand.

More than anything I hope you know that I still love you. That I still think of you and watch fondly from a place just a touch removed. That I still want only the best for you and that I hear your struggles and try my best to be available to you as the spectres allow me. I desperately hope you know that you are important and you are loved and you are incredible.

The haunting of my heart and head will take me longer to resolve. It may never end, but there will be peace. I find glimmers of it once in awhile, quiet moments of contentment. In louder moments of joy. Some of those are with you. I hope they give you as much life as they grant me.

All my love,
A Whisper in the Night

Last updated July 22, 2019