Love and hate are lovers and if you tell me otherwise you’re a fucking liar.

Sickly sweet, like lemon and sugar. The weight in one, makes the other its worst version of its self.

I don’t fall in love. I promise. I don’t. I remember when I was 23 and I swore every which way I was in love. I remember my smirk because I knew no one would believe me. I was the pillar of not needing anyone. I was the one waiting. Waiting for it all.

I remember meeting someone the same day I met my best friend Amy, we all three sat together in the corner of the small, smelly english classroom in the small smelly english building on campus. She was firecrackers, she was loose a finger, she was bright glory raining down in the sky after a big bang. She was a story I vaguely remember, maybe about her marrying a man her father’s age when she was 19. I was 19 when I gave up my first kiss, pinned us against the hallway of a college apartment. Pinned like a rare insect. I collected bugs as a teenager.

I swear my heart was in my tongue. I swear hearing feral, terrible details of a teenager married to a man broke my heart and her casual tone made me an accomplice. I don’t remember right and wrong, I remember what people told me and how I could help hold the walls before they would crumble.

I don’t fall in love. And I think may be part of it. I thought I loved the men who thought they saw me. But when you give people a shuttered version of yourself. When you don’t know yourself, how can you let someone in.

The darkest parts of me have only had moments of clarity. The best and worst thing about it, I see the worst of me, and I really like her. She’s a fucking fighter. She is vicious. The age old question of being a woman… Do I want to be her, or am I attracted to her?

Guilty. She is, she’s heavy with it. With sins and celebration. She doesn’t have a regret because if someone doesn’t love her, the weight of love means nothing to her. She understands scars, and blood. She understands fuck ups, and failures. She understands crawling out of the worst versions of ourselves to depth and discovery. To wells of love, and living. Is it instinct, she asks… covered in blood.

Or is it just how some of us live, the hunters. The scarred. The defendants. The ones determined to die on their terms. Victim isn’t a word for some of us, survivor seems a bit performative for her. She sees deeply into the eyes of survivors and can reflect right back. But the word itself has a bitter taste on her tongue. She’s fought so fucking hard, but that one time, she didn’t know how to fight before the fight started.

Instead, she fights against the brutal and unforgiving waves of being. Living isn’t living until you see, feel and acknowledge that you’re on a boat and that the captain you thought was the captain never was, and you have to grasp the title and responsibility in the middle of the biggest storm of your life. Everything you’ve known is a cruise, and instead you must grasp tightly to the reality that you’ve seconds away from a fate as vast and unknown as being hurled into space. You will live or you will die. Will you lose your mind while you are thrown in either direction.

And so you navigate. Seeking acknowledgement that will never come. Fighting tooth and nail against something much bigger and scarier. Do you become bigger and scarier? Do you allow the tides to take you, either into the dark, or maybe to the light.

I know love and hate are lovers. I know life and death are too. Paradise and eternal suffering. But is your hell on earth someone else’s heaven? Can you dream of hell because you understand the fight and how it makes you feel more alive?