From a Distance

Loving you from a distance isn’t easy when I’m standing so close to you.

To be honest, it is painful.

When you are near my heart beats furiously and my stomach, full of butterflies, churns anxiously anticipating the moment when you will leave. Once you move from sight that hole returns. That gaping hole in the center of my chest reappears with its searing edges eating through the whole of me as I wait to be truly seen by your eyes.

It is a painstaking reality to love without reciprocation having given your warmth to someone only to stand in the cold outside their front door without receipt.

Sometimes, like a mutt, you crawl to their back door to partake of whatever scraps they may throw, but their garbage leaves you unsatisfied—still hungering, still thirsting for their love.
Yet still, without reserve, you give yourself over to them. Taking the hurt of budding romance deep within yourself. You stand garnished with a crown of thorns holding tight to emotions that are only to be mentioned in drunken moments. Called out in times when no one, not even you, will fully remember what was said. There you are left standing in the dark of this cathartic moment clothed in a lingering sense of discontentment and embarrassment.

Yet, you still love.

Why do you love given the circumstances? You do so because it is your purpose to love. Your life is a pursuit of love, a gift of love, a reality of true loves actions. Unfortunately, in the world our love is imperfect and often misdirected. There are times when we love what we do not need, cannot have and should not want. That said, the love between a man and a woman can be beautiful when pruned to the mirror image of Christ and the Church.

So, I wait. I wait for the moment when this seed becomes a rose and these thorns, while still a struggle, are redeemed with beauty. A beauty not our own, but centered upon our 1st love as we look out together in a purposeful moment.

As I wait for you to be ready, loving you from a distance isn’t easy when we are standing so close. In fact, it is painful, but this battle , in time, will bring to fruition life’s beauty—love.