shackle of love

All I have ever known of love is a cage, and I don't want to do that to you.

I always hated that saying: "If you love someone, let them go."

You see, I was raised to hold onto the things I wanted, the things I loved in case they got taken away from me. Just as my mother got taken away from my father, just as my father got taken away from my mother.

Growing up, the only way to keep something was to keep it close. 

In kindergarten, my teacher gave me disciplinary notes for never sharing my toys. In 5th grade, my coach kicked me out of practice because I didn't let another girl use my goalie gloves. In freshman year, my best friend wouldn't talk to me for weeks after I refused to let her borrow one of my shirts.

I am a greedy, selfish child aware only of my own heartbreak and grief.

I don't want to be this way. But all I can remember are nights when my mother would come into my room and sneak things out, pretending she thought I was asleep and not watching her. Not watching her take my DS Dad gave me for Christmas, not watching her take my favorite doll Papa had left to me when he died, not watching her take pieces of my childhood away from me to pay for our apartment, our food, our lives.

In my family, what was yours wasn't. From age 0 to age 14, everything you had could be taken away at any moment for one less bill to pay.

I guess that's why I'm so attached to you. You have stuck by my side without an obligation, without hoarding you, without forcing you to stay. I don't recall anything of mine that I haven't kept close to my side that has stayed.

After every overreaction, every confession, every breakdown, you stay. And I don't even have to ask.

I guess that's why it's so easy to fall in love with you. The unanswered prayed finally came to fruition too many years too late. Or just at the right time. You stay and you stay and you stay when I don't ask you to, when I ask you not to.

But I am a greedy, selfish child aware only of my own heartbreak and grief.

So when we don't talk, I panic. I think about every other person, every other thing that can take you away from me so easily that I also think of all the ways to keep you here.

I don't know how to get someone to stay without making them.

I guess that's why it's so hard to tell you I love you. Because, to me, love has always been an obligation. 

Love is 23 years of gold chains around my parents' fingers. Love is 21 years of a fix-it son. Love is 18 years of a let's-try-this-again daughter. 

Love is 3 years of concealer and baggy sweatshirts, trying to cover up for a boy who believed that love meant bruises around my neck and my arms and my legs. Love was the weeks I stayed at his place, trying to leave but never having the courage to walk out the door.

So I don't know how to tell you "I love you" without making it sound like a shackle. I don't want love to be the cage you lock yourself in for me. I don't want love to mirror a lonely tower with us as the only inhabitants. I don't want to depict a red noose surrounding your heart.

I do not want to be your jailer.

Instead, those shackles will become mine. A home, I will make that cage, filled with plants and poems and books and movies and everything we have ever talked about. My tower will be the one inside my own mind, isolating all I am and all I want from you. The noose will be a voluntary necklace around my heart, binding tighter and tighter as my heart beats faster and faster for you.

God has taught me that love is sacrificial. I cannot be anywhere close to Jesus' sacrifice, but I can sacrifice my own selfish desires to see you prosper.

You won't be my jailer, I will.