I wanted to keep him there to hold me up, to rely on, to remind me that there were places we found in other people that were safer than any walls could keep us.

Love should be easy. Life is hard. Relationships are complicated. But the love, that’s the one thing we should be able to count on.

You will always be my first love. My first everything. No love will be like the one I had for you, but I think the loves that come afterward can be just as good and most of the time better, because we are better. I was jealous when you first started dating her, because I could tell she was different. I kept wondering what she had that I didn’t, but it wasn’t her that was different, it was you.

I hurt myself by hurting you.” His face wore a look of compassion. I hated that look, because it reminded me that he was a good person, that he had tried over and over to apologize. He unwittingly brought out the part of me that I hated, and I projected that hate onto him, because it was easier to hate someone else than to hate myself. Tears poured out of my eyes. And he wrapped his arms around me, holding me as wept. And I hated that his arms still felt good.

Maybe there are some people you can’t unlove no matter how hard you try. Maybe there are some people you stay connected to, because they’ve hurt you to your very core. You keep hoping that somehow the pain can be resolved if they finally do the right thing, but the right thing can never be done because it had to have been done in the past.

Maybe we love people forever. Maybe some relationships were derailed by time and circumstance, but somewhere in the background there was a place where that love still existed, where you were still those two people in that time.

Hope can have sharp edges as it leaves you.

Sometimes the beginnings of relationships are the hardest. People always say the beginning is the easiest, but two people trying to let their guards down and be open to intimacy can be hard too.

I think when we love people we offer them the opportunity to break the barriers that prevent them from finding the love they deserve.