Let Me Try

I am built from flinch and fracture. From silence where softness should have been. From hands that taught me to duck before they taught me anything worth knowing. I learned the geometry of someone's anger before I ever learned the shape of being held.

I don't know what it feels like to be wanted in a room. To walk through a door and have someone's whole face change because I showed up. I have never been the person somebody couldn't wait to talk to. I have been tolerated. I have been the noise someone endured between the silence they preferred.

So when you reach for me, understand: my body has its own memory. It will betray me. Your hand rises and my shoulders know a story your fingers have never told. I might jerk away from the gentlest thing you've ever done. That is not about you. That is the ghost of someone else still living in my bones, still pulling the strings of a girl who had to make herself small enough to survive.

I am not enough. I have practiced that sentence so many times it doesn't even sting anymore, just sits in my chest like furniture, like something that was always there. Not pretty enough. Not interesting enough. The things I say land wrong. The things I do are sideways, off-center, never quite the version of a person someone could love without effort.

And you. You are the kind of thing I was never supposed to have. I don't know what I did to end up standing this close to you. I don't deserve it. I know that the way I know my own name. Something in me is convinced that people like me don't get people like you, that the universe made a clerical error and any minute now it will come to collect.

But God, I would do anything. I would learn a whole new language if yours was the mouth speaking it. I would unlearn every crooked thing I was taught about love and start from nothing, from zero, from the most embarrassing kind of beginning. I would be yours in every way you'd let me, and I would spend the rest of my time trying to become whatever it is you need.

I will be strange. I need you to know that. I will ask you if you love me on a Tuesday afternoon for no reason. I will need you to say it twice. I will watch your face for evidence of leaving before you've even thought about the door. I will act crazy and I will know I'm acting crazy and I will not be able to stop, because the girl who lives underneath my skin has been running threat assessments since she was old enough to read a room.

I am used to protecting myself from the person who was supposed to protect me. I built walls with my bare hands and I built them so well that now I live behind them, alone, safe and suffocating in equal measure.

But you're here now. And I want to know: can I put it down? This armor, this flinch, this constant calculation of how long until someone I love becomes someone I fear. Can I stop bracing? Can I let you be close without monitoring you for danger?

I am asking you not to fix me. I am asking you to stay in the room while I try to fix myself. To hold your hand out long enough for my body to learn that not every open palm is a warning. To say my name like it belongs to someone worth calling.

I don't know what love feels like. But I think it might feel like this. Like standing at the edge of the highest thing I've ever climbed, knowing I could fall, and jumping anyway.

Not because I'm brave. Because you're worth the terrible, beautiful risk of landing.