Seesaw

Seesaw.

Love is hard. A facade of tender affection is a thin sheet thrown neatly over the box, covering the contents of emotional rollercoasters, heartaches, and teenage angst. Or rather, that’s how it is to love you. Hard.

It’s arduous, this unusual oscillation between love and hate; a seesaw in which one second I’m high with adoration and the next I’m at the nethers of bitterness. But I could never truly hate you, no matter how much I scream it in my mind. I love you. I hate that I love you, because I’m not sure if the next time we speak will be a low or a high on the seesaw. I’ll love you even when it’s a low. I hate that.

I often wonder: am I enough for you? You’re beautiful, smart, nerdy, cool, funny, caring--everything I could want, on paper at least. It took me a while to realize that you aren’t perfect (after all, who is?), just like you warned me about. Beneath all your beauties is a boy with a lot of baggage who turns into someone different at times. I hate it when you become him. You hate it more.

“What made me ‘strong’ has also made me tough, unempathetic, and sometimes cruel.” You told me that once.

But you aren’t the bad person you think you are; you’re a good guy who makes bad decisions sometimes, just like anyone else. I love you, but I don’t know if you know how to love someone, especially when you can’t love yourself. Is it stupid of me to try to fix that--is it in vain?

I wish I could take away that pain. I wish I could make everything okay. I wish I knew what was going on in that dumb brain of yours. I wish it was that easy.

It isn’t.