I am Falling in Love
Who let you feel like this? A homecoming, a blanket to wrap myself in. I want to hold all of you, corded muscle and tufts of baby blonde. Fill my nose with coconuts, fall asleep right here.
He makes me want to write poems. What? It’s true, I would waste all my days nuzzling the spot right behind his ear, where his curls are the softest and clean with the scent of his coconut shampoo. He is always warm, like clothes fresh out the dryer. I wear his arms like a seatbelt, and I feel at home.
When the day is long and the air is heavy, opening the door to him doing homework on the bed feels like someone’s unlatched a window. A breeze sweeps through me. I can unfurl myself there, in his presence. I can remove the binder in his lap and replace it, and answer his questions about my day. It feels a little childish even, like regressing. When, before this, was the last time I was held in someone’s lap and asked about school? He makes me feel like a little girl again. It’s strange, but sublime.
This is all very new. I’ve never had a person in my life that sees me the way he does. I’ve cried in front of him, and it was paralyzingly awkward when I felt that first tear burning to escape. But he scooped me up and made it better. No one has ever made it better like that—I’ve never exactly given anyone the permission. He represents possibility; an answer to the question of “What happens when I open up my entire self to another person?”
Roots of intimacy dig deeper into the soil; tendrils of transparency and vulnerability anchor us into a space that’s emotionally safe, something I’ve only ever truly had with Mom. I can trust him with my sadness and with my anger because he’s received it all with empathy. From this, a beautiful partnership is growing.
We’re still figuring out how that partnership survives in the great big world, because even as I write this on our two-month anniversary, the walls of our greenhouse can’t help but slowly cave to the wear of real life. On days when communication is an afterthought, or time feels like an impossibility, a small piece of me wilts. But somehow, someway, one of us manages to show up with a watering can: a text, a pint of ice cream, or a home-cooked meal always comes.
He and I are very different, but our love languages are the same. We swaddle each other in affection, and our daily instinct is to spend some form of quality time together. He isn’t as big on gift giving as I am, but what he lacks in material generosity he makes up for in acts of service. I just mean to say that I love to spoil people with thoughtful presents, but he places more value in making us dinner and fondue from scratch.
I like learning from him, whether it be how to cook or how to not take myself too seriously. He humbles me and I him; we bring out the inner child in each other. At the same time, I think we’re helping each other grow up. At the ever dramatic age of twenty, and in our first adult relationship, both of us are being forced to confront the parts of ourselves that never had much consequence. I’ve had to face and push through my emotional repression to prove to him that the vulnerability we had was mutual. He’s had to practice the tedious differences between being with a girl and dating a woman.
He taught me how to have sex, all of it. Holding his hand, I crossed that threshold with him and became something new—something ripe, realized, older. He is and forever will be the first person to have seen me naked, and the only person to witness my discovery of that universe; like a baby learning to use their voice or their legs, all of the joy and confusion and disbelief and devotion that comes with it. In a certain way, I will always see it as me giving myself to him. And I know this means I’ll never forget him.
It’s true that I’m witnessing myself slowly—atom by atom slowly—fall in love. But for every word of adoration on this page, there’s a thought about heartbreak holding me back. The feelings that I have for him are big and consuming most of the time, so much so that they compel me to siphon them out by writing. When I wake up next to him in the buttery morning sun and crawl onto his chest, it’s impossible to imagine a life in which he isn’t there breathing beneath me. But the reality is that nothing, not even he, is guaranteed.
Watching my parents divorce, and then every other happy couple in America, showed from the start that love doesn’t last. Mom says that true love lasts forever, but then what’s the difference? On the day that I can’t help myself from saying “I love you” any longer, how am I supposed to know if the love I speak to isn’t the kind that slowly dissolves as soon as a job opportunity across the country appears? How am I supposed to know if on the day that he tells me he loves me, he means that he’ll love me until he dies, no matter what the time in between brings? It’s impossible to tell. I feel like I won’t know if it’s true love, and so I don’t know if I’m wading deeper into an ocean of something that will either float me away into forever, or drown me in inevitable loss.
When I whisper to myself that I do love him, I think, yes but not as much as his future wife and mother of eventual children will. When I run my finger along his brow bone while he sleeps, I think, how many more times will I get to do this before he can fall asleep without it? When we have sex, I think, he says this is the best he’s ever had, but that’s only until someone better comes along. It isn’t insecurity, it’s chronic and unbearable realism. The odds that you marry your college sweetheart are slim. He’s going to go to med school soon, I’m probably going to stay in New York for my career. The undergraduate honeymoon is going to end, and the commonality is that it’s going to become too hard to continue. Whether or not true love will blossom and save us, who knows. The weight of uncertainty bears down almost too heavily on my heart for me to surrender it completely.
Mom tells me It’s better to have loved and to have lost than to have never loved at all. We’ve all heard that one before. I want to believe it, to let down all my walls and worries and love him with everything that I have. It would require me to accept the possibility of being more deeply hurt than I ever have been in my life, and choose to survive that for the chance to know his love. It’s not something I can allow myself to do overnight, but with every day and every kiss on my hand that passes, I feel myself getting closer.
