pavorst:

The beauty of falling in love with someone is that you start doing it in small mouthfuls. You start breathing their scent until a part of your lungs is just suffused with them. You don’t notice, but you start picking at crowds until you see this one person. You thread more and more of your happiness on the appearance, on the existence of this other being. It is an inexplicable connection, this oneness that you start to experience. Soon, you unwind from the present and become addicted to the future. Every plan becomes furious and curls into pages and pages. You think about a place, some permanence. But in all of your fervour, you lose sight of what it is that made you whole. You start to cut and shape yourself into the ideal, into whoever it takes to be good enough.

And then you reach a day in your life when you are doing something mundane. For me, it happened as I brushed my teeth in the morning. I caught myself standing at a mirror, dressed in someone else’s favourite colour and wearing someone else’s gifts on my hands. I started noticing how unlike me I had become. And all for what? For the promise of this other person, this great love. It’s all untrue. Whatever they tell you about glances filled with meaning and sunny afternoons and dancing to Louis Armstrong in the deep midnights. All of it doesn’t exist. Because if you want that kind of thing, you have to give up something that is fundamentally you. You have to trust another human being to sleep next to you, skin to skin. Something inside of me snapped, that day, like an instinct that I had numbed and buried had suddenly caught fire. It was the day that I realized that in order to completely love another person, I had to first kill away a part of myself. I had to cut away something inside me and share it with them. It went deeper than novel tastes and music tapes. It was some part of a future, some dream. And I couldn’t do that. I still can’t do that.