The Truth About Love

by Maisie Myers

“The whole world isn’t rotten, but it’s like all you can see is the ugliness,” he whispers, almost as if he doesn’t mean to be speaking aloud. I’ve never felt so exposed. “There are still beautiful things, Summer-Raine,” he says gently, reaching out to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear in a gesture so intimate I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to breathe again. “You just have to let yourself see them.”

You can’t keep shutting out the world because you’re scared of letting people in,

maybe my misery isn’t written in the stars. Maybe I’m not fated to spend my life alone in darkness. Maybe I can have some colour in my life if only I let it in.

“We all have baggage, some people’s just come with a label.”

“Mental illness doesn’t make you a burden. Only a weak person would think that of you.”

Because isn’t that basically what love is? Not wanting to do something but doing it anyway because you care more about the other person’s happiness than your own.

It’s treacherous, this thing between us. This connection that we have. The ache that fills me, the pain of craving her nearness, the desperate, wretched need to be as close to her as possible could start world wars, I swear it. You can roll your eyes and call it teenage melodrama, but I know as surely as I know my own name that there are no two people on this Earth more tightly tethered together than me and Summer-Raine.

sometimes to truly love someone you have to let them go.

Without me, life will be better for them all. They’ll be free and happy and safe. Because protecting them from the things in the world that can hurt them sometimes means protecting them from me.

Mental illness isn’t a choice. No one wakes up one morning and chooses to be depressed. I certainly never wrote ‘depression’ on my Christmas wish list, but I was gifted it nonetheless. So why should I be ashamed to take a few prescribed pills if they help to keep the demons at bay? Especially if they help me live the life that I’m desperate for,

For so long, I’ve hated my monsters. I’ve blamed them for the pain I’ve felt, the mistakes I’ve made, the times I’ve hurt the people I love. I’ve always thought that it was because of them that I couldn’t be with Auden. But that’s not true. It’s not my condition that was the problem, but how I dealt with it. Having depression didn’t make me any less deserving of Auden’s love, but the way I treated him did. I know that now.

But isn’t it better that you got to have that experience, that all-consuming, death-defying love, than to have never had it at all?”