The Part Of Me I Never Thought I’d Open Again

There’s a part of me that thought I died the day everything I had once had known as my life came to light.

This double life he was leading. Years of betrayal, gaslighting and coercive control.

This day came long after we separated. The end of August 2024. Financial disclosure. All in black and white, staring at me right in the face.

The day any remnants of trust imploded, the day my nervous system capitulated.

The day love became something I associated with danger, humiliation, with the quiet kind of abandonment that steals your voice before you even realise you’ve gone silent.

I buried that part. Deep. So deep I stopped believing I’d ever feel anything that wasn’t survival.

So when love knocked again, seemingly out of nowhere.

The old adage “I wasn’t looking”, because I really wasn’t.

I was exhausted by empty words, weird experiences and well, people to be honest.

But in he came. With the kindest smile I had ever seen. An energy about him I had never felt before.

“I have to speak to him” I remember thinking, clicking the message button on the Tinder profile.

Hesitancy took over for a little while, because love isn’t supposed to be kind.

“Not after what I lived through” I thought.

Love comes with storms. Love shatters you.

Love teaches you to sleep with your shoes on just in case you need to run or hide from yourself.

At least, that’s the kind of love, I had learnt to expect.

So when he appeared, without chaos in his hands, without manipulation in his tone,

without the quiet arrogance of somebody who assumes I’ll tolerate whatever they serve me, I didn’t know what to do with it.

At first, naturally I questioned it. Pulled it apart. Waited for the mask to slip.

I was prepared for the moment he’d reveal himself as just another man who loved the way things looked but not the way things were.

Except that moment never came.

Instead, he stayed.

Through the shaking. Through the hypervigilance.

Through the way my body sometimes remembers pain before my mind does.

He stayed in the spaces where another had left wounds.

He stayed in the conversation instead of the blame.

He stayed even when my fear tried to convince me there must be something wrong with him for doing so.

He actually called me out on it. It stopped me in my tracks and pulled my head in. Truthfully. Without that, I would’ve found a way to push him away.

And that is what undid me.

Not the affection. Not the warmth. Not the promises.

But the consistency. I had never experienced that before in my life.

The way he didn’t take my scars personally.

The way he didn’t demand I be “over it.”

The way he treated my past as something to understand, not something to compete with.

Letting love in again has nothing to do with romance and everything to do with surrender, reverence and trust.

It is hauling the part of myself I buried back into the light

and whispering, “I know you’re scared, but I need you to let him in now, it’s time.”

It is letting someone see me in the brutally human moments where I forget how to breathe because my body thinks history may happen all over again.

It is choosing not to run even when my whole system screams for the exit.

It is surrendering the armour I built from a betrayal that still makes me sick to my stomach. Still causes medical issues.

And allowing tenderness to touch my big, bold and brave heart.

Letting love in again is haunting.

Not by the past, but by the possibility that this time…this time…it’s real.

And so I stand in this doorway, between what hurt me and what holds me now, and I open the door I promised myself I’d never touch again.

Not because I trust love to be permanent.

Not because I believe pain won’t ever return.

But because I finally learned that protecting myself from heartbreak

was also protecting myself from everything that could save me.

This isn’t me choosing a man to save me. I saved myself.

This is me choosing myself in a way I never have before.

This is me saying: If love wants to meet me, it can meet me here with my truth, with my tremble, with my whole unedited heart.

And for the first time ever, I believe I might be worth, that kind of love.