Two way street.

I always wanted to love someone. Isn't that the heart of every woman though? Deep in her core and her self and her spirit, all she really wants is to devote herself to someone else in a way that is incomparable and irrational and beautiful. I tried very hard for a very long time, but I was a hopeless case it seemed. A failure. And God help me, failure eats at me in a different way it does others. A bigger, harsher, more brutal way. I would die for perfection. I'm trying to change that, but I'll admit it till I do. I need a standard of grace. For the time being, I murder my mistakes. And for the time being, I lust after mercy and forgiveness.
So I failed.
I wrote some sappy essay on love and how I was unfit to love someone and it said stupid things like, How do you do that? How do you love yourself enough to love someone else? How do you find your worth and believe in it enough to declare an amorous devotion to another human being? How do you do that?
But I was going about it all wrong. It was always me, loving someone else. Me. And me. And me.
Love is a two way street.
You have to meet each other. Somehow or another. The really lucky people are already going the same direction. But then there are some times when maybe one of you has to turn around and go back and then go the same direction as the other. Sacrifice. An ultimate gift. One of you might have to change in a small way, or a big way, and give things up. Give dreams up, and hopes up, and beliefs up. Both of you might have to change.
Love is a two way street, but when you're in love, it only seems to go one way.
Blindness, that creeping creature of a disease that strikes those who fall for another.
I think she loved me first.
When I read the old letters we wrote to each other, stacks of them, wrapped and tied up with twine and ribbon, dried flowers tucked in envelopes, coffee rings on the edges of pages, things learned and things not learned, I can see that K loved me first.
She was always the more eloquent one. The simplest. The fairytale.
But I was the one who turned around on that street. I was blind.
I like that. I like that I followed her without knowing what she would be to me. How we would grow and trust each other and change. We've shed so many skins together, I feel like I've known her since eternity. But that's a lie. I never even met her when she was ten.
I just know that she loved me, and suddenly it wasn't about loving someone anymore.
It was about being loved.

K bought me a bowl for Christmas. It's white. The first time it came it was broken, and I cried. The second time it came it was whole, and I cried. I cried because I liked the bowl, of course, but really I cried because she constantly lets me know that I'm cherished. Before Kirsten, I never knew what it was to be cherished. I just knew I was insufferable and a mess and I had flaws I didn't like at all.
The thing is, I was on the wrong side of the street.
I was on the side without white bowls. The side without knitting and penmanship. Without coffee in the early morning along with breathing that is the best because you're only just awake enough to be thankful that you're alive. The side without bread, hot, fresh from the oven and your hands and knuckles that beat it into its loveliest form. The side without tears. Without the self-assurance to proclaim that you actually like poetry. The side without "Peter Pan." Without nice ink pens and gold glitter and notes jotted on the back of a brown paper bag. Without late, late nights on cots and in forts. Without raw confessions about God in a vulnerable time of life. Without Fairytales in reality. Without French. The side without grace. I was on the side of the street without grace.
I was walking the wrong way.
Thinking I had to learn to love someone when all I really needed was to be loved so I could learn that.
I was walking the wrong way. And then this beautiful, graceful girl came by. And she gently turned my gaze, she shifted my focus, but only a little, just until I could glimpse what was on her side of the street. And in a single second of time, a blink of my eye, a choice that was so unlike me, I turned, and I followed her. I stepped across the line on that two way street. I went to the other side.
And I haven't looked back or turned around since.

Sometimes, all it takes is a girl. A girl who sends you white bowls.

Thank you K.
I love you.