The more time I spend with you the more I realize it was never just love. I need you. and I mean every single word of that, I am not reaching for poetry, I am telling you something I fought very hard to never have to tell anyone.

I tried to lie to myself for a long time. I told myself I didn’t want this, didn’t want to love you, didn’t want to arrive at a place where another person became necessary to me. I was afraid of dependency the way some people are afraid of heights, not because it isn’t real but because the fall from it is. and somewhere underneath that fear, only recently coming into focus, was something I didn’t know how to hold about myself. that I feel things deeply. that I always have. that the numbness wasn’t my nature, it was my defense. I loved too much and got hurt too completely and somewhere along the way something in me made a decision, if feeling everything is going to cost this much then feel nothing at all. and so I went quiet inside. for years I went quiet inside.

And then you. and I didn’t have language for what was happening, I only knew that the quiet was getting louder in the wrong way, that something was thawing that I had worked very hard to keep frozen. I never measured how much I needed someone until I had you and felt what it meant to be held by another person’s understanding. you get me in a way that doesn’t feel like luck, it feels like recognition, like you are reading something written in a language everyone else mistook for something else.

I feel like a child saying this and I am saying it anyway. I need you more than you probably know. I have so much love stored in me with nowhere to go, so much of it, and you are the person I want to give it to, all of it, the fierce protective kind and the soft terrified kind and everything in between. but I also need to be taken care of. I need someone to remind me not to be so hard on myself, to remind me that the world is survivable, that I am allowed to breathe, that my nervous system is allowed to rest. being with you doesn’t just feel good, it regulates something in me that nothing else reaches. it shows me things about myself I couldn’t see alone, and some of them are actually worth seeing. because of that, you are my remedy

So please keep this. hold it somewhere close. someone is depending on you the same way you depend on me. the distance hurts us both now, not just you. I am overly needing you and I am done pretending otherwise.