He’s loved me more than anyone has ever loved me in my whole life, and maybe that’s precisely why it makes me so sad.
Part of it is that somewhere inside me, I still don’t feel like I deserve it. I often fail to understand why he would feel this way about me, why he would choose to be this patient with me, this gentle, this caring. And sometimes, when I can’t make sense of it, I find myself wondering if perhaps this is simply who he is. Maybe he loves everyone this way. Maybe there is nothing particularly special about me at all. Maybe I’m taking something that comes naturally to him and making it mean more because I’ve never experienced it before.
But then there are all the ways he has loved me that feel impossible to dismiss. He has loved me through my mood swings, through the difficult moments, through versions of me I struggle to love myself. He has been patient when I expected frustration, gentle when I expected distance, and present when some part of me was already preparing to be left alone. And through all of it, he has made me feel more loved than anyone ever has in my entire life.
The strange thing is, he has never actually told me he loves me. At least not in those words, not in that way. And yet, this is the most loved I have ever felt.
Maybe that’s what makes it so damn sad. To finally experience the kind of love I spent my whole life wondering about, to finally know what it feels like to be cared for so deeply that I don’t have to question whether it is there, and still not know what I get to do with all of it. To have something feel so much like love without ever being able to call it mine.
Maybe some of the greatest love we experience in our lives doesn’t arrive with the certainty we thought love was supposed to have. Maybe sometimes it simply arrives, holds your hand, loves you in every way that matters, and leaves you wondering how something that makes you this happy can also make you this sad.
She Was Sea 