Mercury is in retrograde. The sky is red, the ocean is white, birds fly backwards. I’m falling in love.
Everything I ever thought about relationships, my ability to be loved, my ability to love back, my ability to trust and let myself be trusted, has been turned around upside down and all around. It’s the easiest thing in the world and yet for me, this is entirely new and unchartered. I feel like this wonderful man has been handed a feral cat that’s been occasionally touched and fed but bolts if you reach to lift it. He says he’s got nothing but time. He’s here. I can tell him anything. He wants to know what happened to “hurt you so bad.”
Last night, I was laying in his arms on the couch, while he kissed my face all over and rubbed my back. This is our normal. We are officially Those People that are in constant contact, and sit on the same side of the table at restaurants. I got fixated in his eyes and I kept staring into them thinking how unfair it is to him that he’s going to have to learn about my past. He’s going to have to navigate me slowly, and know why I might tense up. I wish I could spare him that. I wish this wasn’t on the horizon. He furrowed his brow and asked what the face I was making meant. “What are you thinking? Something’s turning up there, Beautiful.” I said nothing, and tried to dismiss it but it was such an incredibly lame attempt at dismissal that we both ignored it.
He said to me very seriously “you can talk to me about anything.” I buried my face into his neck and held on tight. Tight enough to make him stay. I kept squeezing him, and my breath shook. He ran his hands up and down my sides for a long while, letting me. He finally whispered “you just want my piece of pumpkin pie. You don’t have to be so dramatic about it.” I laughed so hard I started choking. He’s just so damn sweet. I don’t know if it will last.
I think it will. In my deepest heart, I know it will (if I let it). I’m afraid though; I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to say “you have to take it slow with me, because I was raped five years ago and I haven’t been the same since.”
I don’t know how to say that to him, place that at his feet, and make him have to figure out how to navigate me in this new normal. I don’t want him to be afraid to touch me. But I owe it to myself to tell this man everything, and put the wall down, and just…leap.
Birds are flying backwards and so am I, up and over the moon, into universes unseen.
