It is difficult to love a woman who went through hell and came back from it.
Many have tried and many have failed.
If you feel weak, it’s not even worth it. You will need much more strength than you thought you had; more patience, a spirit of resilience, more tenacity and more determination. You will have to show a relentless love, a determined love that never admits defeat.
A woman who has gone through hell and come back will tend to push you away. She will test you to find out what wood you are heating yourself from, to find out if you have the strength to weather the storm. Because it is unpredictable – sometimes like a tornado, a force of nature whose anger actually reveals only pain; at other times like a weak, calm and silent downpour.
When it will be this soft shower from which tears flow, love it.
When it is this thunder, these lightning strikes and these devastating furious winds, love it even more.
She is ambivalent, a pendulum that will always balance between the fear of suffocation and the fear of being abandoned and she will never know how to find a fair balance between these two things. Because she will be anxious, even if she doesn’t tell you.
One day, she will want you to be close to her, to pass her hair behind her ear, kiss her on the forehead and hug her tightly. The next day, she will dream only of independence, space and solitude.
While you sleep, she will be awake, unable to silence her thoughts, looking at the clock, trying to tame time, trying to put the pieces together and make sense of it all – her life. She fights her demons and slays the dragons, lest they come back to assault her or lose control if she falls asleep. The next day, it will be exhausted and your presence will suffocate it. She will need solitude.
When she asks you, love her.
When it repels you, love it even more.
Situations, experiences, places and new people will distress him. She will demonstrate flawless independence and will be impatient to overcome her fears but at the same time, she will be only a little girl alone, lost in the vastness of the world. Sometimes she will need to show courage, to prove that she has what is needed in her.
Other times, she will need you to take her hand and squeeze it very tightly in yours. It will happen to him not to know what she wants and you will have to read in her, as one reads a book whose pages are damaged and the cover stained. You will have to be what she needs, when she herself will no longer know.
When she is brave and faces the world alone, love her.
When she is afraid but refuses to take your hand, love her even more.
She will live in fear of not being good enough and always overdoing it – a lifelong struggle to find balance. In the fear of seeing the balance tilt more than one side than the other, in the fear of being itself and of realizing that nobody likes it, does not like either of these two facets.
When she feels like she’s doing too much, love her.
When she feels like she is not well enough, love her even more.
He will sometimes not be in pain, a beautiful light emanating from his eyes and his laughter becoming a rare and precious melody. But from time to time, the trauma still inhabiting her body will make her suffer excruciatingly; she will be in pain, she will be dying of pain. The light will disappear and the melody will be silent.
When it is only light, love it.
When it is only darkness, love it even more.
She will love you with caution, she will always have a foot outside. Because she does not know what unconditional love is, this love powerful enough to withstand difficulties. She cannot allow herself to believe in love, not completely, and she will keep some parts of her heart for herself – those who have suffered the most, those who cannot risk suffering again, after she has took so long to put them back on.
She will always expect you to leave her. And while you are still there, her heart will tell her that you will eventually leave – it is only a matter of time, everyone she loves will eventually leave her.
So, she will try to sabotage your relationship; it will seek to destroy it, it will seek to leave first, it will seek to make you suffer before you make it suffer. This is how she keeps control; this is how it survives; that’s how she makes sure she never suffers again.
When she wants to love you, love her.
When she wants to make you suffer, love her even more.
She is terrified of losing control. Never make him feel helpless, trapped, or have lost his freedom. She needs to dance barefoot under a blue sky, to feel the sand under her feet, to run among the wolves as the wind panics through her hair … Because that is where her healing lies. Never cut its wings because as long as it can fly, it will always come back to you.
Love her when things are simple and love her even more when they are no longer.
Love her in a way that defies everything she thinks she knows about love.
Love her because each part of your soul understands that her love is a precious gift, understands what cost she had to pay to offer you her fragile heart.
She doesn’t need you. She chose you.
Because you have everything you need to survive the storm.
Because even when she no longer knows how to love, you know how to love even stronger.
