The Rain Will Not Apologize

I have a confession to make, and I am already lying about it.

Not in the words. The words are true. But in the tone, in the performance of confession itself. I am confessing to you as though I am not still, at this very moment, committing the crime I am confessing to. As though telling you about my destructiveness somehow absolves me of it.

It does not.

I don't think I've spent my life searching for love.

I've spent it searching for proof.

Proof that I could give more than anyone else. Proof that I could stay longer. Forgive quicker. Understand deeper. Carry heavier things.

But here is what I will not say out loud until forced: I have also spent my life ensuring that no one could ever love me the way I claim to want to be loved.

Because if they did, I would have to become a different person. And I am not sure I want to.

Somewhere along the way, I mistook endurance for love.

I built an altar out of unreciprocated affection and called it virtue.

It is a terrifying thing to realize that suffering can become a personality.

You wear it long enough, and eventually you stop asking to be healed. You begin asking to be witnessed.

People tell you that love is patient.

So you wait.

People tell you that love sacrifices.

So you bleed.

People tell you that love expects nothing.

So you convince yourself that wanting to be chosen is a moral failure.

And then one day you wake up unable to distinguish devotion from disappearance.

Perhaps I never wanted to be loved.

No.

That's too easy.

Perhaps I wanted to remain the kind of person who could never accuse the world of not trying. If I loved everyone beyond reason, then every empty-handed return became evidence of my goodness.

There is a strange comfort in being the one who loves more.

You never have to answer the more frightening question.

"What if someone loved me exactly as I have always begged to be loved?"

What then?

Would I know how to receive it?

Or would I distrust it?

Would I dismantle it piece by piece until it resembled every disappointment I'd ever survived?

There is an arrogance hidden inside perpetual heartbreak.

It whispers that nobody has ever understood you.

But perhaps they came close.

Perhaps you simply kept renovating the house every time someone learned the floor plan.

Every time someone found the door, you built another hallway.

Every time someone memorized your language, you changed the alphabet.

Then you stood among the ruins and called yourself unknowable.

What an extraordinary way to participate in your own loneliness.

Maybe that is why, after drowning once, I still look at the clouds with hope.

Not because I have forgotten the flood.

But because some irrational part of me still believes that this time the rain will remember it was once meant to help things grow.

There is a frightening possibility I have avoided my entire life.

Perhaps I do not fear abandonment.

Perhaps I fear the day no one abandons me.

Because then I would lose my oldest excuse.

If someone finally stayed, I could no longer blame absence for the emptiness inside me.

I would have to admit that loneliness and solitude are not the same disease.

One is cured by another person.

The other follows you into every room.

I have spent so long introducing myself through my wounds that I no longer know what remains after they heal.

Who am I if I am not the one who loved harder?

Who am I if I am not the one left behind?

There is an odd arrogance in believing your suffering is irreplaceable.

As though the universe selected you for a private tragedy.

As though pain itself recognized something exceptional in you.

What vanity.

Millions have loved.

Millions have buried dreams.

Millions have watched people leave.

The tragedy was never that I suffered.

The tragedy was believing suffering made me singular.

It didn't.

It only made me human.

I have begun to suspect that hope is not the opposite of despair.

Memory is.

Hope survives almost anything.

Memory does not.

Every time I love someone new, I perform a quiet act of betrayal.

Not against the people who hurt me.

Against the version of myself that swore, with absolute certainty, "Never again."

He was sincere.

He believed the verdict was final.

He did not know that the human heart is an unreliable witness.

It forgets.

Not the names.

Not the faces.

The pain.

Otherwise no mother would have a second child.

No widow would remarry.

No refugee would build another home.

No one would ever fall in love twice.

We call this resilience.

I am no longer sure.

Perhaps it is simply that the soul edits its own history in order to keep itself alive.

Because if we remembered suffering with perfect accuracy...

Hope would become impossible.

And yet...

Why, after drowning once, do I still look at the clouds with hope?