You sent me that reel about Woody Allen quote and I watched it three times. to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. and somewhere in the loop of it I found myself, because that is exactly where I have been living, caught in the logic of a trap I built around my own heart and called it protection.

You were always smarter than me, and wiser too, I will admit that without flinching. you said love is about vulnerability, about accepting it, probably at the first times, I didn’t know what vulnerability meant, sitting with it, not running from the open wound of it. and you were right. but I was afraid. not in the way people are afraid of romantic heartbreak, that was almost too clean a fear for what I carried. mine was older and less nameable. it came from a series of abandonments I collected before I even knew what love was supposed to feel like. people left. again and again people left. and eventually something in me decided, quietly and without asking my permission, that if I never fully arrived somewhere, no one could fully leave me. so I became defensive. I became someone who stood at the door of every good thing with one foot already pointed toward the exit. I questioned the innocent people brought

When I met you, something in me shut down. because you were too much of what I actually wanted. and my mind, which remembered every abandonment even when I couldn’t, said no. not this one. do not hand her your heart. so for three years I went numb. I held you at the exact distance where you couldn’t quite reach me. and I called it being careful when really I was just terrified.

And now we are here. sharing the soft and frightening truth of each other, at the cost of being genuinely hurt, and I am still afraid, but I am here. I trust you with this more than I have trusted anyone with anything. but I need you to know about this, the one that lives underneath the love. when I hurt you, something animal in me wants to disappear. not out of cruelty, and that I want to leave you, but out of fear, she would be better without the source of the pain. that if I removed myself I would be doing you a kindness. I know how selfish that is. I know that leaving dressed up as mercy is still leaving. and I know, I have felt it in my own life, that the pain of someone going is always worse than the pain of someone staying and getting it wrong.

So I am promising you, and I am promising the part of me that wants to run, I will not go. not when it gets hard, not when I disappoint you, not when the old instinct rises up and tells me distance is safer than presence. I am learning, slowly, that staying is the whole thing. that vulnerability is not the risk you take before love, it is the love itself.