TOTHEUNTAMEDHEART.

When you both professed your love for each other, that night through those texts, leading to a phone call, leading to a late night drive where music was faint & voices were careful, dancing around the elephant that sat in the room. Tongues held, tiptoeing around the broken-hearted girl, still picking up her own pieces of you.

Days like today when the sun won’t come out to distract our minds, days like last Tuesday when you pranced around with her once more, days like last month when you’re it’s not you, it’s me stood aligned with I am completely over her, days like this I wish that night never came. These days the love I swore I would never lose doesn’t linger over me as it did. When our eyes catch each other, they land in empty places. Home isn’t you anymore.

The regrets change like the seasons, they change like your heart. All in a day, all in a moment, just like you. My mind doesn’t know what it wants. I used to regret not bringing you around my family & friends. For a reason I could never explain, I kept you divided. So when you cut your ties, I thought of all the maybes. Maybe I should have let you stop those Thursday nights at the bar my friends always played music at. Maybe Tuesday nights I should have suggested we go to the bible study with my close friends that I had been attending for the two years it had been on. Maybe I should have fought for my grandparent’s house for dinner on Sundays over your parents, where we spent most weeknights. Maybe I am right to regret it all, because maybe I did it all wrong.You were my heaven, they were my earth. You were surreal, they were gravity. So when heaven bottomed out, gravity pulled me back down & taught me how to stand. After my heart began to settle back into a new normal, disconnecting from yours, I was more thankful for the separation than anything, as it was the only thing left untainted by your memory.

So now, for the kind of regrets in which my closure rests on. By regrets, I mean lessons learned in ways I wish I could have danced around & acquired the same knowledge. When we came back twenty minutes late from our lunch breaks (business meetings), when we sat at your desk answering phone calls of which I couldn’t stop laughing to page over the intercom, when you called me every half hour those Saturdays you were at work & I was at my grandparents, all those times when the people who loved us said those words

go slow.

These words are my lesson learned. They are my biggest regret. The words I had assumed people meant to suck the excitement out of everything, the words I thought were spoken out of misunderstanding, were actually the best relationship advice I could have been given.

When they said go slow, I thought we aren’t having sex, automatically classifying my relationship safe. If the pants stay on, what can possibly hurt me? Love, I was so ignorant. While everyone shouted slow down & I resented them, placing them in the category labeled “against us”, I never thought to ask somebody why.

Here’s your what- as in, what am I slowing down when we’re remaining pure- as well as your why.

In a relationship, your words matter. How easy it is for us to scowl at the harmful words of two bickering lovers when they speak those hurtful things in the midst of raw emotions, yet we neglect to see the potential harm in the exact opposite as well.

He whispered love into my ear within the first two weeks of us becoming “Facebook official” (because that’s when it’s most real, right?). We talked marriage, kids, house, job, church, laying everything on the table so fast that within the month I had dropped out of school, he had taken me to tour our future house, & we had gone furniture shopping for that new house. So when two days after we had gone to pick out furniture he told me he wanted to call it quits, my world broke. I broke.

Maybe you are not there yet, & you’ve done no more than watch others go through this rush. Maybe it’s worked for them & they’re happily married with three children. Maybe they fell out of love just as hard as they had fallen in, & maybe they are sitting in the shards of glass now. & maybe this is you, & you are looking into his eyes, shaking your head at me, you don’t understand, placing me in the boat with the others who are against your love.

Hear me out, I am for your love. I am for you. I want you to fall madly, wildly in crazy love with the perfect man who makes God’s love more real than it has ever been. I want you to fall deep with a man who doesn’t make 1 Corinthians 13 another to do list, but rather makes it the natural description of your entanglement. I want your marriage to be more than your wedding day & so much more than the day you met. I want that for you, & more than anything I want your love story to last, which is the reason I have joined their side. I want you to save that sacred thing that I lost. I want you to wait, because this is what protecting your heart looks like. This is keeping it safe. Knowing that you feel something on the inside doesn’t mean you have to be an open book, spitting the words out as they come. Give yourself time to relish each stage. Taste the sweetness of those words on the tongue. Allow time to make everything you want to say the most clear. Wait. Be patient, be thankful, & most importantly, be slow. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time.