Love that needs space

My therapist told me that maybe I love like my mother loves me—a love that’s all-encompassing, overwhelming, suffocating, a love that chokes you even when you’re visibly gasping to breathe. And I thought about it. Believed it for a second there. Because it’s so easy to think that this is the reason why people love me but can never stay, why I am the best thing to happen to them and also the worst thing they experience. It’s so easy to believe that I might not be loveable and that it might be my fault all the same. But then I thought about it some more. I flipped through all the instances of my love. My unbridled, pure love. Love which gives so fully with no expectations in return. Love which only asks for hopes for love in return. Love that blossoms with no seeds, no water, no sun, no air. Love that feels like being loved. And I realised I don’t love like her. I don’t love in panic and in anxiety. I don’t love in confusion or propriety. I don’t love in screams and anger. I love with love. I love gently and tightly. I love in a way that’s all-encompassing and overwhelming, but never suffocating. I leave no space in love because I want no space to be, no distance, so that I can see all your flaws up close and you can see mine and I can still love you fully and unconditionally. I love in the way I love because of her. Because she taught me how to love when I was a kid. Maybe she forgot her own love along the way, but I carry it within myself still. I crave for the love a baby gets from their mother, with no sense of time or space or priorities. I crave for a love that loves fully and unconditionally. That doesn’t abandon you or leave you to hold your love in your hands alone, that doesn’t ask you for your tears as proof of love that you have grown. I love the way I love because of my mother, yes, but I do not love in the way she loves me. I love in the way I want her to love me. I love without doubts or partiality. I love because I believe that humans aren’t meant to be without it and where is our humanity if not in loving everything. I love because love is poetry and literature and in every piece of writing that I read. I love because I don’t want to live a life where love is not every part of my being. I love in a way that most people do not understand. I love in a way a young me wouldn’t have understood, but I know she would’ve looked up to me. I love in a way she needed to be loved, in a way she should’ve been, she deserved to be. I love the way I love because of my mother, yes, but I do not love in the way she loves me.