I was Twelve years old when I first confessed my love for somebody. It was my first date, first kiss, first girlfriend. We would swap our school photos to be carried in each other’s empty wallets, talk at length over text, hold sweaty and nervous hands, and sit together in long awkward silences. My parents were high school sweethearts, and I figured that if I didn’t meet my wife during my high school years, then I was doomed to be alone and childless forever. I was equally naïve in my recent puberty, as I was in my understanding of love. 

Aside from the last few years, I’ve jumped from relationship to relationship ever since, all just as serious and loving as the last, trying in vain to be with someone I wouldn’t squeeze so tight they’d fall to dust through my fingers—I suppose my naivety hadn’t diluted with age. I was older, but no more fragile, no more ignorant of my need for another’s affection and acceptance. I would glue myself up like dropped China each time a romance would end, only for the pieces to keep breaking into smaller and smaller fragments when it would happen again. 

It is not to say that I would move on to another long term and all-consuming relationship just to replace the last. Rather, I told myself that simply I fall in love too easily, like Chet Baker, though unlike him, I had no deeper demons to be slain. It seems even my denial was romantic and tragic and sentimental. 

It is only now, after years without a partner and years of contentment and even happiness in my own company, I have asked myself if maybe it was some empty space inside me that needed the residence of a lover to make me feel whole. Or perhaps it was a lack of self-worth that made every relationship so nourishing, so intoxicating. As my reflection was sullied and ugly, they were Venus upon her shell, Mary of Nazareth cradling Jesus. This of course is an unhealthy and destructive way of thinking, it dismisses your partner’s care and admiration for you when you only allow yourself to wallow and revel in self-hatred and pity, whilst constantly praising them for their intellect and beauty. It was their love like blood that kept me alive, their arms like crutches to hold me from falling, and all I could do was tell myself I didn’t deserve them, even if I couldn’t let them go. 

Upon my diagnosis with borderline personality disorder, I did some research into the condition and some contributing factors that lead to a positive diagnosis. Often the patient will be impulsive, have feelings of intense passion and fear of abandonment, with a history of failed relationships. Although I have never had any recognisable fear of abandonment, I would grieve the ending of every romance like a death. I would lose myself in a sinkhole of despair, anger, and regret. Having lost the love of my life as if they had passed and realising I gave myself away again, led to thinking perhaps I should harden up my heart, as if covering it in Kevlar for no one else to touch. When really, the answer was to love myself and become emotionally balanced, before being able to love someone else with the balance they deserved. 

By no means am I criticising partnership, for falling asleep and waking up next to the one you love is one of the happiest and safest a person can feel. I have felt wild unabashed love,

and crushing self-destructive defeat, and the love will be worth it every time. It is only upon reflection, and either my ignorance to, or avoidance of, addressing issues within myself that I realise how I let mine and others love, though forever unforgotten, go to waste. 

Of course, there are shades of grey between the black and white narrative I am writing here, but the message remains: 

It is the idea of another, platonic or otherwise, brightening my already shining life that I welcome, not to be a single lamplight among the darkness. 

It is being able to live with yourself that grants you the privilege to give yourself wholly to another.

An Old Friend

I awoke to you dancing with the morning rain 
in that shirt of mine you borrowed the night before 
the one you said was ugly and not worth wearing 
but you were beautiful still and slept in it anyway 
we’d been out to that new Italian place in town 
you said it was okay, but your cooking was better 
but the wine was nice and we drank much of it 
I felt weightless and tipped the waiter above my means 
and told our cab driver you just agreed to marry me 
you only blushed and said for me to shut up
I grinned and said surely that day would come 
you smiled and said for me to shut up.

and with you in my shirt and my arms we slept until we woke 
I at peace with the rain falling and the rising dawn 
and you 
a devil may care angel dancing barefoot in the puddles 
I watched you 
and your wet hair throwing diamonds 
your body’s perfect pirouettes
in love with your lust for life
I watched you
through my window  
from your pillow 
and with the sun still smothered by the grey 
you were the only rainbow worth waiting for.

I watched you in a daydream thinking,
if this girl’s made of watercolour
what a masterpiece. 

Written by Thomas Hannah

Blogger @poemstellium

Instagram: @brokesellout