you & me

The Question At The Corner Of My Heart.

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How dare you?

How dare you come here and ask me to trust you? How dare you enter this house and be imperfect and be human? I am so fragile and yet here you are, making me open up and break out.

Here you are, with your own problems and pains and past. Here I am, with my tears and hopes and fears. You with your wretched imperfections. Me with my twisted incomprehension. Us together, hoping to be saved from ourselves.

You dared to come and demand that I be better than I am. Or perhaps I demanded it of myself, in my ragged heart desire to finally love.

Did you know what you were doing when you walked in here with your mirror face and reflector body? Did you know that you would soon reveal to me all the places where I am weak and inexperienced and trembling? Did you know that I would be fucking crazy? Did you know that you would be too?

It was opposite you that I saw where I was flawed and unsure and fresh. But I suppose it was also opposite you that I saw where I am strong and kind and, yes, even beautiful. The mirror doesn’t lie, that’s what they say, isn’t it?

The mirror reflects the good and the bad, the stunning and the despicable, the superhuman and the subhuman.

It was in your eyes that I first had a chance to see my tenderness, my willingness, my quick instinct to care. I saw that I am expansive, that I have no limit, and that I could hold you all day and all night.

I could kiss the space between your eyebrows until the world turns to ashes around us, I could wrap my legs around you and touch your lips and stroke your hair until the sky turns purple and the sea overtakes the land and we are the only things left on the Earth.

In this way, our hearts will press up against one another and have conversations; they will whisper with wisdom the things we don’t know how to say yet, something about not wanting to hurt anymore and something about just wanting to be loved.

When I’m scared, it’s your arms I will seek, and when you are beat down, I’m the one who will make you feel better. In the mist and the gray, we’ll hold tight and not let go. You’ll touch my back even when we fight, and I’ll rest my head on your shoulder even when we can’t speak a single word to each other.

When you are drowning in haze and I am choking on my own throat, we will still find each other’s pinkies and clasp them, even if they are the only parts of us that can bear to touch.

I will do all this with you — put your neck in my hands and your tears on my fingertips, put your name in my heart and your heart in my hands — because you showed me something I’d never before known for sure.

Could I love? If given the opportunity, could I rise to it? And… would I ever be given the opportunity?

Yes, I discovered. Yes, I can love and I will love.

But that isn’t the only question I’ve carried with me.

It’s not the original question, the question-since-birth, the hissing tormented whisper. It’s not the question that sits on the corner of my heart like a fragment of broken crystal, catching light and obscuring my vision. It’s not the question that lodges like tiny shards of glass in the tender soft tissue of my body.

There is one question that always lies thick and heavy on my tongue, the one that persists when nothing else does, the one that gets to weigh in on all my decisions and actions, the one that is present in all my rejoicing and all my grieving.

The question is this: Am I worthy of being loved?

And that’s the question I still don’t know the answer to.

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Hannah Harris

Hannah Harris

Hannah Harris grew up in the pure mountain air of Lake Tahoe, NV. She is now a Yoga teacher and writer in San Francisco. She believes the the single best thing any of us can do for the rest of creation is find the time to truly know and then madly love ourselves. Find her on Instagram and Facebook, or read more of her thoughts at Wayfaring Gypsy.
Hannah Harris
Hannah Harris