A Door, Not a House

There is a love that men mistake for their own invention, as if the heart discovered fire and forgot that the flame was lent to it.

But love was never mine to create. It was given to me the way breath is given — before I asked for it, before I understood what it would cost me to keep breathing.

I have loved before I was ready to. I have loved the wrong way, with hands too tight, trying to hold a person the way I once held a bottle — as if love could numb me instead of change me. I built altars to people who never asked to be worshipped, and called it devotion, when it was only fear wearing a nicer coat.

That was not love. That was thirst, dressed up and given a name it did not deserve.

Real love does not come from the well of what we lack. It flows from what has already been poured into us — a grace we did not earn, offered first, so that we might learn to offer it to someone else.

This is the secret no one tells you at the altar or in the beginning of things: you cannot give away a love you have not first received. Every empty man who has ever tried to love a woman into filling him has only proven this. And every woman who has tried to earn love by disappearing into someone else's wants has proven it too.

Love does not begin in the chest. It begins on the knees.

I do not know if I am ready to love again. I only know this — that if I ever do, it will not be to fill a hole that only God was ever meant to fill. It will be an overflow. A gift passed forward, not a debt collected.

To love another person is not to complete yourself in them. It is to hand them something that was never yours to keep — freely, the way it was given to you.

So if love finds you again, and if you find yourself standing in front of someone whose eyes ask you to be their whole world — remember: you were never meant to be anyone's god. You were only ever meant to be a door someone else's love could walk through.

Let it walk through you.
Do not block the door out of fear.
And do not mistake yourself for the house.