I Think I Was Born to Love

I know.

It sounds cliché.

Like something stitched onto a pillow
or written beneath a sunset.

But it is the truest thing
I know about myself.

Not carefully.

Not strategically.

Not with one hand on the door.

I have always loved
the way rivers love—

giving themselves away
without asking
where they will end.

For a long time,
I believed that kind of love
would be returned to me.

That somewhere
there was a person
capable of meeting me
with equal abandon.

Someone who would look at me
and feel what I felt.

Someone who would recognize
the miracle of being chosen

and choose me back.

Instead,

I became familiar
with partial things.

Half-open doors.

Almosts.

Maybes.

People who loved me
in portions.

People who admired the light
but left when they found the switch.

And still,

I loved.

Because loving
has always felt more natural to me
than withholding.

There is a quiet truth
I carry now.

One that arrived gently,
without bitterness.

I may never be
someone’s once-in-a-lifetime person.

No one may ever search
a crowded room,

find my face,
and feel that sacred certainty—
there you are.

I have been loved.

But the kind of love
that rearranges a life,

that roots itself
so deeply in the soul
it changes the landscape forever—

that love
has always passed me.

Close enough to touch.
Close enough to believe.

Never close enough
to stay.

I have spent years wondering
what was wrong with me.

Whether I was too much,
or not enough. 

Whether I should have softened
my sharp edges.

Shrunk myself
into something easier to keep.

More convenient.
More digestible.
More deserving.

But age has a way
of introducing you
to yourself.

And somewhere along the way,
I realized

my imperfections
are not evidence
of my unworthiness.

They are evidence
that I was here.

The cracks in me
are not flaws in the design.

They are proof
of use.

Proof of weather.

Proof of having carried
more than my share of hope.

So perhaps
the story of my life
was never meant to be

finding someone
who could love me
the way I love them.

Perhaps the story

is that I never stopped loving
despite all the reasons
I had to be guarded.

I think I was born to love.

And for the first time,

I think that might be enough.

Jacque Michele