Sugar Words

It is difficult to listen to your heart when it pulls you in different directions – the one that keeps whispering, despite, despite, urging you to stay, or the one that knows the pain too well and quietly asks you to go. It is about love, but it also scrapes up something deeper. Do you love someone enough to stay through the hurt, to sit through the breaking and bending, or do you love yourself enough to leave before it becomes a crime scene?

Simone de Beauvoir tugs at me from the side I am almost afraid to trust. “What then is love? Not much, not much; I come back to this idea. Sensitivity, imagination, fatigue, and this effort to depend on another; the taste for the mystery of the other and the need to admire.” 

But what if that sensitivity, the way you peel yourself open and let them in, is what ends up hurting you? What if the dependence that once felt sweet turns into the thing that hollows you out? Should you stay anyway? Should you sit still and brave the storm for the hope of being seen and admired?

Is it fair to oscillate between agony and ecstasy for love?

Or is it simply the nature of love itself to stretch you across a vast and trembling distance between wanting and surrendering?

Maybe the real cruelty is not the ache but the belief that love should be clean, that it should only nourish and never wound. We forget that touching another soul means touching something wild, something that cannot be domesticated without killing the thing that made it precious in the first place.

Simone leans in again, soft but relentless, reminding me that love is fatigue, sensitivity, the exhausting effort of reaching out even when every reach risks bruising you. So, should you endure? Should you sit through the tides, trusting that somewhere in all the chaos, you might be truly seen?  

Love is not a loyalty to suffering. Love is a loyalty to the truth. Sometimes it asks you to leave, not because you loved too little, but because you loved in a way that refuses to swallow you whole. It is not about choosing between the heart that says stay and the heart that says go. It is about the slow and painful work of listening to both, of letting them weave something together, something stronger and quieter.

And so the question stays, tender and terrible, Can hold both kinds of love at once, trembling in your hands, and still choose life?  There is a kind of grief in even asking the question. A quiet mourning for the version of you who once believed love could be simple, if only you were good enough, patient enough, selfless enough. 

What matters is not that you always get it right. What matters is that you listen. That you let yourself feel it all without letting the ache turn you bitter. That you know when the sweetness runs out and all that is left is a kind of nausea you can no longer swallow down. The only brave thing you can do is to believe that there is tenderness always waiting for you, somewhere.