Questioning Words and Love

For years, I’ve let the voices from my youth dictate my perception of myself. I still hear the words of distaste and hate that rang from the mouths of classmates who didn’t know that the alphabet dressed up as ideas could wound. Sixth grade was when I began to hate myself. My measurements grew and my love of the foreign and safe worlds of novels became my refuge. I could always choose my own adventure and it never mattered what the shape of my body was or that I wore thick glasses to be able to read. I wouldn’t say that I hated my innate character or my personality because somehow I always knew that I was a special type of person. Not sure of what ways in which I was special, but I knew. One day I would be say to myself I would be justified for my thoughts. I went through middle school usually with a mind full of knowledge beyond what was needed to traverse the hallways of boredom and mediocrity. I thought about everything, mostly about me in relation to everyone and everything else. Thinking and words were my daily accomplices in my bombing everyone in my hometown.

Today, I continue to wear my insecurities as a guard from actually having to be a participant in living for fear of rejection. I continue to try to please when I know deep down inside that I want more. I want a boyfriend who erases the images of ugliness and stamps them out with silence and debt paid. I want love that rewrites, revises, and reinstates. I want love that allows the adventures of my childhood to come alive and I become reborn and ready to choose new conquests at every turn.

Sometimes I think my perception of love is too thick. Love is love. Love is red and love is blue. Love is life and life is love. This life is worth living and love is worth giving. Follow my path of tears, sorrow, and pain to a land where love covers and protects. Doesn’t that sound like a love song that clouds our expectations of love. But wait God positions love as divine as saving grace. Who am I to argue? A disappointed cycle of love unreturned…or is it love undiscovered.

Perceptions are flawed reminders of actual images. Is love really able to conquer all things? To forget those things which render us helpless and unable to forget? Love has an impossible job.

Underneath the façade of perception is the dream of a little girl of eight who now knows that love is not saving grace or a promise of safety. Love just is.