Brie Nicole Inked

I learned early
that love, for people like me,
arrived with instructions.

Be quieter.
Softer.
Less aching.
Less honest.
Less alive.

So I folded myself into smaller and smaller versions,
creased at the edges like paper worried between nervous hands.
I trimmed the wildfire from my mouth.
Bit down on every bright thing inside me until my teeth tasted like smoke.
Until I could no longer tell the difference
between devotion
and disappearance.

Still,
they loved me in fractions.

In careful little sips.
In conditional weather.
In almosts.
In ‘you’re too much’ spoken like a wound.
Like my tenderness was some unbearable thing,
some flood no one wanted to drown inside.

And God,
I would have loved them whole.

That is the tragedy.

I loved with both hands open.
With ribcage split wide.
With ugly honesty.
With trembling loyalty.
The kind of love that stays awake at 3 a.m. memorizing another person’s grief.
The kind that makes altars out of ordinary moments.
The kind that ruins people who only came to borrow warmth.

But nobody ever stayed long enough
to learn the language of me.

They only loved the edited versions.
The manageable ones.
The dimmed-down girl with her storms tucked beneath her tongue.
Never the full blaze.
Never the sharp-toothed hope of me.
Never the inconvenient enormity of my heart.

So I became an expert in shrinking.

I bent myself into impossible shapes trying to become lovable.
Cut pieces from my spirit like dead weight.
Apologized for my intensity.
My grief.
My wanting.
As if needing to be chosen
was some kind of moral failure.

And every time I abandoned myself to keep someone else comfortable,
something inside me cracked louder.

Now my heart feels like shattered stained glass.
Beautiful maybe.
But dangerous to touch.
Light still passes through it,
Though distorted.
Bleeding color onto everything.

I carry the evidence of unloved softness everywhere.
In the way I hesitate before speaking.
In the way I brace for abandonment before affection even arrives.
In the exhaustion of constantly translating myself into smaller languages.

Still,
Some terrible hopeful thing inside me survives.

Even now.

Even after all this un-choosing.

A pulse.
A flicker.
A furious little sun refusing extinction.

Because maybe the tragedy was never that I was too much.

Maybe it was that
I kept offering oceans
to people only capable of holding rain.