The person you love won’t always make you happy. If love is a tattoo then it won’t always ink laugh lines into the corners of your eyes or needle joy into the grooves of your heart waiting to be filled. Sometimes it will leave bruises in the corners of your skin where you assumed only color would be.
The person you love is like a shadow box- occupied with space after space of scars, failures, lyrics, favorite astronomical terms, regrets, words that were meaningless and hurtful that they said anyway, and simple joys. They’re constantly on a mission to occupy their own skin with ease, just as you probably are, and in doing so, they have to claim their own territory. Their skin is their land and their land only, unless they want it to be shared, whether it’s acres or millimeters. And when a person is on a mission to occupy their own body easily and safely, they may not want to let someone else in all the time. They may just want some time alone in their body or time to think and sleep and breathe. This probably won’t lead to happiness on your behalf, especially when this person is someone you love deeply, as deep as the Marianas Trench or quicksand. Because when you love someone, often you want to spend as much time next to them and inside them, literally or figuratively, as possible.
But when they push you away, you can’t drag your feet. You can’t stick to them like sandpaper.
You have to let them go. Not just on a tether or in an allotted space twenty feet away, but as far away as they wish to go, whether it’s for a few hours or a few weeks, holed up in their bedroom under heavy down blankets or compulsively and sadly drinking alone.
Whatever they choose to do, you have to learn how to leave them be. Because “alone” doesn’t always have to equate to “loneliness.” Sometimes you can feel more lost and abandoned with someone else than by yourself, and if the person you love is feeling like this, then you have to respect their boundaries.
And yes, boundaries are hard. The Pacific Ocean doesn’t always want to constantly stay inside its lines and against sandy shores; it probably wants to spill over in tidal waves and tsunamis every once in awhile, but it has to respect the levees that hold it back. And maybe the Equator wants to be redrawn sometimes, placed on the other side of the world, but maybe the other side of the world doesn’t want it there. So a compromise has to be made, and that’s that.
Sometimes the person you love will need some space, and that’s the how and the why of it. Not necessarily space like an entire universe filled with a billion different constellations and black holes, but maybe just a tiny portion of that universe. A single corner of it, perhaps. Maybe one or two black holes to occupy, to stay in and with until they want company again.
And this will likely make you unhappy and unwilling to let them go off on their own, exploring that tiny slice of universe, but just like wind, you’ll never know that desire in the person you love exists until it threatens to blow you down.
You just have to learn how to weather the storm. Without them this time.
But even in the middle of a hurricane, there is always a lighthouse that will guide you home.