Trusting Love
Trust is like the lock of a cage around my heart. You can rattle it and make it shake to the core. Battering its fallen and fortified walls, the dark bars reflect its glistening light. Knocking your knuckles against its sharp edges, the pierce of cold metal ripples through your skin- yet it doesn’t quite hit the nerve. But then, out of nowhere, like a sledgehammer to the ground, you crash into me going a million miles a minute. I tremble in fear as the expulsion of myself begins to quiver. For now that the door has been ripped open, the lock can never be unseen for what it has become. Dangling by the thread of a cord, its small frame slowly swings open.
Reaching into the cage that surrounds me, you eagerly search for my hand. Kids playing hide and seek, yet not wanting to be found, I stumble back into the dark corners where no one can see me. The real me. I shrink myself into a shrink a dink size and place my hands over my eyes as if then they can’t see me. But they come closer; their footprints begin to search the small space in anticipation of my beating heart. And as my heart beats rapidly inside of my chest, I feel as if I will explode. That they must hear the throbbing as vividly as it is in my head.
Grasping the edge of my frail and worn toes, they gently extend a hand. A hand that tries to make me forget all of the shaking they have just done to the cages surrounding me. A hand that is covered in scars- scars that look really similar to those engulfing my body. So on a limb, I ever so carefully extend mine and they intertwine like keys in a lock, the lock that has now been broken off my cage completely as we begin to dance. Clinging to their hands, I am timid at first. I wonder if they can hear my heartbeat in their fingertips that gently caress my small frame. Spinning me from one side of the dungeon to the other, I pause.
Ripping my hand from their embrace, I look out through the barriers of this battlefield. I see into the chaos and the problems that will surely arise; the fear of the unknown and the mysteries that I simply can’t imagine in my mind. But as my thoughts begin to spiral and I almost hit the floor, I am shocked to find them beside me, gently catching me in their arms. Turning me to face them and readjusting my hands in theirs, I am pulled close to their heart that trusts me, and let go of everything holding me back from being vulnerable with theirs.
Facing the monstrous walls around us, we begin to make our way in strides. Hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm, they whisk me away from side to side. And before my mind begins to wander, before it starts to overthink if this is safe, if this is right, if I can predict the stability of this love, it is as if they hear my mind. For in the sweetest sound I’ve ever found, I hear, “My darling I’m by your side. I’ll never leave you, but I’ll always love you and that’s enough to break down all your walls inside.”
And like the flip of a switch, I see the lock fall and I begin to feel something inside, the freeing of a weary spirit letting go and finally choosing to come alive.
