To Be Loved the Way I Love

I slowly close my eyes.

And wish.

The kind of wish that does not rise from hope, but from starvation. From the hollow place in the chest where love has been buried too many times and still refuses to stay dead. I wish in the dark, where no one can see the shame of it. Where no one can hear how badly my soul still begs for something it has never truly been given.

To be loved.

Not liked. Not desired for a moment. Not touched like a passing thought. Loved.

Loved the way I love.

God, what a dangerous thing to want.

Because I do not love gently. I have tried. I have tried to soften it, to make it smaller, to hold back the flood with trembling hands. But my love has never known how to kneel quietly in the corner. It comes like a storm over a graveyard, like thunder shaking open everything that was meant to stay buried. It comes with teeth. With devotion. With hunger. With the terrible willingness to ruin myself if only it means I can keep someone else warm.

And still, I dream of someone who would not fear that.

Someone who would step into the storm and call it home.

I want to be loved by a person who does not look at my heart and see a burden. Someone who does not flinch at the intensity of me, who does not mistake my depth for madness simply because they have only ever swum in shallow water. I want someone to find all the dark rooms inside me, all the places where hope went to die, and not run from the silence there.

I want them to light a match.

I want them to stay.

I want them to see the mess of me and still think, mine.

Not for a night. Not when they are lonely. Not when the world has left them cold and I am the only fire they can find. I want to be chosen in the daylight too, when there are easier people to love, prettier masks to admire, softer hearts that do not bleed so loudly.

I want someone to choose me when choosing me costs something.

And maybe that is why the fantasy destroys me.

Because in my head, it is raining.

It is always raining.

The sky has torn itself open above us, and I am standing there drenched, trembling, too proud to ask and too broken not to hope. My hair is wet. My hands are cold. My heart is doing that pathetic thing again, that foolish reaching toward someone who might never reach back.

And then they do.

They grab me like restraint has finally lost the war.

They turn me around, pull me into them, and look at me as if they have been haunted by my face since the first moment they saw it. Their breath shakes. Their hands shake. Their voice breaks under the weight of everything they can no longer bury.

“F*ck, I love you,” they say. “I have loved you since the first time I saw you.”

And for one impossible second, the world stops being cruel.

For one second, all the versions of me who begged, waited, cried, and wondered why they were never enough fall silent. For one second, I am not the woman left behind. I am not the almost. I am not the lesson someone learns too late. I am wanted. Chosen. Claimed by a love that has finally stopped pretending it can live without me.

What a beautiful delusion.

What a merciless little dream.

Because no one comes.

No one stands in the rain for me.

No one loses their mind at the thought of losing me. No one reaches for me in a crowded street like I am the only thing keeping their world from collapsing. No one confesses with blood in their voice. No one says they have been waiting for me all their life.

People do not love me like that.

People come close. What cruelty that is. They come close enough to learn where the warmth is. Close enough to rest their tired souls against mine. Close enough to make me believe I have finally been found. They touch the parts of me I kept hidden, whisper softness into the places where I was already weak, and then leave as if they did not awaken something they had no intention of keeping.

They always leave.

And every time, they take something holy from me with them.

A little faith. A little softness. A little piece of the girl in me who once believed love was supposed to feel like being saved, not like slowly bleeding out in a room no one enters.

I do not know how many times a heart can be abandoned before it becomes a haunted thing.

But mine is haunted.

It rattles with every name that almost stayed. It aches with every hand that held mine only long enough to teach me absence. It remembers mouths that spoke tenderly and still made silence their final answer. It remembers how it felt to be held like something precious, then dropped like something replaceable.

And the worst part is not that they could not love.

No.

The worst part is watching them love others the way I begged to be loved.

That is the wound that turns black.

To see them become gentle after you. To see them offer patience, effort, devotion. To watch them hold someone else with the hands you once prayed would stop letting you go. To watch them say the words you carved out of your own ribs just to ask for.

Then you understand.

They were capable of it.

They knew how.

Just not for you.

There is no humiliation quite like that. No ruin quite so quiet. Because suddenly all your begging looks different. All your nights of wondering what was wrong with you become a kind of cruelty. You were not asking for too much. You were not too needy, too intense, too difficult, too impossible.

You were simply standing in front of someone who had already decided you were not worth becoming soft for.

And still, I loved.

God help me, I loved.

I gave my heart like it was a treasure, and they held it like spare change. I placed the most fragile thing I owned into careless hands and then blamed myself when it came back broken. As if I should have known better. As if love does not always require a little blindness. As if devotion is not, by nature, a kind of suicide.

No one wants a love whose only offering is a heart.

Not anymore.

A heart is too simple. Too honest. Too easily dismissed. People want convenience. They want beauty without responsibility. They want the warmth of being loved without the weight of being worthy of it. They want someone to adore them, but not need them. To want them, but not ache. To stay, but not ask for anything in return.

But I have never known how to give a heart without giving the whole body that carries it.

I am not made of half-measures.

I am made of all or nothing.

And lately, it feels like that means I am made for loneliness.

Because my soul, foolish thing, still keeps searching. Still keeps turning its face toward locked doors. Still keeps mistaking footsteps for arrival. Still keeps whispering, maybe this time. Maybe this one. Maybe this will be the person who sees the altar of my heart and does not desecrate it.

How pathetic it is.

To remain tender in a world that keeps rewarding the cold.

To still want love after love has done nothing but prove how easily people can survive without you.

I want someone to say, “I choose you.”

Not because they have no other choice.

Not because they are lonely.

Not because I am convenient.

I want to be chosen with the world still offering them everything else. I want someone to look at every temptation, every easier path, every person who asks less, feels less, needs less, and still come back to me with certainty burning in their eyes.

“I choose you.”

Over fear.

Over pride.

Over distance.

Over doubt.

Over every beautiful thing that is not me.

I want to be the exception that ruins their restraint. The name they cannot swallow. The face they look for in every room. The ache under their ribs when they pretend they are fine. I want to be loved with a desperation that makes leaving impossible.

I want to matter so much that absence becomes unbearable.

And that is the ugliest truth.

I do not only want to be loved.

I want to be unforgettable.

I want someone to feel the lack of me like a wound. I want someone to understand what it is to lie awake haunted by what they failed to hold. I want someone to finally know the cruelty of missing a heart that once beat so loyally for them.

Maybe that makes me dark.

Maybe that makes me selfish.

Maybe longing, when left alone too long, becomes something with claws.

But I am tired of being the only one haunted.

I am tired of being the only one who remembers.

I am tired of carrying the ghosts of people who sleep peacefully without me.

Sometimes I imagine a different life.

A street at night. Rain on the pavement. My coat pulled tight around me. My heart locked away where no one can touch it anymore. And then a hand catches mine from behind.

Not roughly. Not gently.

Desperately.

I turn, and there they are.

The person I have been mourning before I ever met them.

They look at me like recognition has just become a wound. Like every road led here. Like every loss was only the dark making room for this moment. They pull me close, forehead against mine, breath trembling against my mouth.

“Where have you been all my life?” they whisper. “I have been waiting for you so long.”

And then they do the one thing no one ever does.

They stay.

They stay after the confession.

They stay after the storm.

They stay when my sadness crawls into bed beside us. They stay when I am quiet for reasons I cannot explain. They stay when I am not easy, not glowing, not entertaining, not convenient. They stay when love becomes less cinematic and more human.

They stay in the morning.

That is the part that breaks me.

Because anyone can want you in the dark. Anyone can dress desire up as devotion when the hour is late and the body is lonely. But morning is where truth stands naked. Morning is where fantasy either becomes love or dies like everything else.

I want someone who reaches for me in the morning.

Sleepy. Unthinking. Certain.

Someone whose hand finds me before their mind remembers to be afraid.

I want that kind of belonging.

I want the small violences of intimacy. A thumb brushing my wrist. A coat placed over my shoulders. A hand at the small of my back in a crowded room. A voice softening when it says my name. Someone noticing when my smile is only a mask I painted on quickly before the world could ask questions.

Because I am good at that.

I am good at surviving prettily.

I know how to look untouched while rotting quietly from the inside. I know how to laugh with a cemetery in my chest. I know how to make loneliness look like independence. I know how to say “I am fine” so convincingly that even I almost believe it.

Almost.

But at night, the mask slips.

At night, I feel everything.

At night, the lock on my heart becomes less like protection and more like a coffin. I hear the thing inside me still moving. Still breathing. Still scratching at the walls, begging not to be buried alive. Begging me not to give up. Begging me to believe that somewhere, someone exists who will not make me regret being made of feeling.

And I hate it.

I hate the hope.

I hate that it survives.

I hate that after every ending, after every disappointment, after every person who made me feel like my love was too heavy to hold, I still imagine being found.

Not admired.

Found.

There is a difference.

To be admired is to be looked at.

To be found is to be known.

I want someone to know me in the dark. To know the parts I do not dress up. To know where the sadness lives. To know that behind every guarded smile is a woman who once would have given everything just to hear, “I am not leaving.”

I want someone to enter the ruin and not call it ruined.

I want them to look at the ashes and say, “This is where I will build my home.”

What a hopeless thing to want.

What a fatal kind of tenderness.

Because the truth is, I do not know if that kind of person exists. I do not know if there is someone out there with hands steady enough for a heart like mine. I do not know if anyone will ever look at my intensity and see devotion instead of danger. I do not know if love like mine is meant to be returned, or only written about in the dark by women who learned too early how to ache beautifully.

Maybe that is all I am.

A woman with too much love and nowhere to put it.

A locked heart.

A smiling mouth.

A soul standing barefoot in the rain, still waiting for footsteps that never come.

And every day, I open my eyes.

That is the saddest part.

I open them.

The dream disappears. The room returns. The ceiling. The silence. The ordinary light of another day where no one chooses me with trembling hands. No one comes to my door breathless with realization. No one turns the world over to find me. No one says, “There you are. I have been waiting my whole life.”

So I get up.

I continue.

I become normal.

I answer messages. I make coffee. I wear perfume. I pass strangers on the street and wonder, stupidly, if one of them is carrying the love I have been dying for. Then I hate myself for wondering. I hate myself for still searching faces. I hate myself for the small, wounded animal inside me that lifts its head every time kindness passes by.

And then I smile.

Of course I smile.

That is what women like me do when they are breaking in ways no one has earned the right to see.

I put a smile on my face.

I put a lock on my heart.

And I keep living like I am not secretly waiting for someone to love me so deeply that the lock finally rusts, the door finally opens, and all the dead things inside me rise toward them, whispering,

there you are.

Too late.

But there you are.