My Tender Heart my Open Wound

We’ve felt most of our tenderness before.

I was walking with my friends to get an early dinner. A rain had washed over the city the day before. Unexpectedly a warmth swathed back to replace the water that had fallen. Like any town or any city, a surprise visit of warm weather warranted no work getting done. The streets were a murmur with people, their private conversations, their rejoining life wherein between wasn’t so bad a place to be. No one was in a rush to retreat from the cold because there wasn’t anything to retreat from. We were all taking our time along a cobble-stoned Greenwich Village street when we passed by a back courtyard. It was small and hidden behind shrubs was a back door and a window just above it open. Spilling out of the cracked sill I heard the sound of dishes clattering into place. 

I paused a moment. I didn’t know if the dishes had been washed and were being placed in a drying rack or instead being removed from the drying rack to now be put into the cupboard. Or even if like us they were being taken out to be dirtied for the occasional early dinner. But I listened regardless for the clang of silverware the scrape of ceramic and thought this is my love language. These were the only words I could think of to portray this sudden obsession I felt with the sound of someone else’s kitchen. I didn’t mean love language as in, cooking was how I expressed love, but something far deeper within. Those genuine moments that come before you so often you’re never worried if you’ll get another, but you’re frighteningly aware this one is passing. It’s a moment where all love is encompassed in its grasp, makes us tender, bruises us for a moment. It’s a language yes, it whispers in your inner ear, but it’s also something imperceptible. It strikes a chord, one that says this is why you’re alive. Alive in the sense you were born of it, but also alive to find it. And you’re sure you’re made out of it in some primal way, maybe you carried it in you dormant but now it cannot be put out or forgotten.

This happens so often to me, suddenly captured by the everyday and aware of it moving me. Thinking the same thoughts this is my love language this is my love language. A wide-open window, for example, the chatter of a restaurant patio, the silence at a dinner party before the first guest announces they are leaving, the annotations on a used book. They capture me, I obsess over them. It prompts the return to my nature this pulling in and focus of the familiar a built-in reaction. You’d think these moments would fill you, but I find it has a duality. Yes It tells me about myself. I can trace these moments back to times where playing in the lush yard I heard my mother doing the dishes from a similarly jarred window. Or can guess behind even memory there have been many generations of families in my lineage who heard the rattle of dishes at the hands of people they loved. If trauma passes generations so can love. Those parts are filling. Yet the concept of love languages is also a way we show to others our care for them, a togetherness in my own life I less often find. Thus these moments empty me, they point out my aloneness. 

I am desperate for the togetherness and understanding I find whispered in these moments. Where I might point out the sounds the scenes of these corners of everyday life and say this is how I love. To hear back this is how I love too and know they understood. To be seen the way it feels life sees me when it captures me like it did outside that open window. Every love language I come across in one way proves the proximity we have to each other. This desperation and sensitivity for closeness is perhaps what makes me so aware of its evading me. How it occurred to me not long ago I haven’t been on a date in the four years I’ve been single. How in moments of passion I get excited, feel very in on one person too soon and they are not ready to receive me. The way historically all dates have ended before they began with a text message gone unanswered, the hour we were meant to meet passing before me in my apartment. That feeling you get when you know they won’t reply but you reach out anyway. My feelings feel disproportionate with time. I told my therapist and my mother, I’m just not cut out for dating, dating as it has become now. The way we so easily abandon each other, the way we forget the people there have feelings even if we haven’t seen them. They have memories where they were loved and rejected even if we are yet a part of them. This lack of an attempt to begin the forces of understanding, of having language for one another. How we forget everyone by now carries with them something wounding them, scares them into thinking of the impossibility of ever meeting someone else and not immediately informing them of this thing they carry which now influences their every decision.

Sometimes tenderness feels like a love language and my wound. When everything normal feels like home every rejection carries with it a rejection of your very nature. When asked to get dinner I think about the act of meeting and dirtying a table knowing a dirty table is my love language. A table paints a portrait of a life lived together with people who want to meet even in the late of evening. Who get a bottle of wine just in case the dinner finishes too quickly and they aren’t ready to leave each other. There is something so wordless and so strongly felt by me. When accepting this opportunity I feel I am letting someone into something intimate. When they leave without word there is an awareness in me that once they were there and for some reason no matter how little we knew of each other they decided to go. I’m not made for the casualness that passes through us. There is nothing in me to give that is casual.

Even with the knowledge it is possible to be loved deeply, to share my languages, the way I know love will happen I feel this culture pushing on my natural tenderness, forcing me inward. Yes, I’m sure I will be loved, but I don’t know how to love because I have so much of it. 

It’s possible too in some ways I’m not yet brave enough to let my tenderness be at the mercy of someone else. Despite being so fascinated with togetherness I still choose quiet often to be alone. Sometimes too I feel it chooses me. I wait to be understood instead of offering up the words I could probably find for others. I reject the idea love could be waiting in places I don’t expect but also wait for the unexpectedness to show up where I have left no space for it. I like people and say nothing. I like people I know are safe because they won’t like me back. I see an open window on the street and stare silently. I take my love languages home with me. 

When I say I’m not cut out for things what I mean too is I’m made too precisely for it. Maybe tenderness is proof you were meant to be here, to witness life in that way the tender get to see it, with care, with uncompromised love. This tumultuous affair’s only consequence is how easily it bruises you and how easily it is done— when every open window has a grip on your very being. I trust too that this is worthy of something. The fact that it is lives in me, made from the love someone shared to make me is just further proof of its worthiness. Further proof there is a gentleness out there that can take me in and though it might not understand entirely it will know what to say. These mundane moments in the present are our own separate whisperings but are also the evidence of two past merging languages. 

These genetic forces that make us also keep us safe so one day we are capable of taking out our tenderness to be touched. As I said, that primal feeling that we are seeing love travel through time to meet us on a corner in Greenwich village reminds us what it means to be alive. That you have the opportunity to see what is yours and collaborate to make it ours. No, this tenderness is not for nothing even if it feels isolating, even if it feels wrong for where I am. I’m not brave, but one day I will be. One day what now means nothing will suddenly be everything. How now as I stare at a flickering candle in my room I can’t trace it back to somewhere far away. The ancestral bonds are not there. Yet it’s possible years from now when I’m gone someone I loved enough to make will walk along a dark street. On this street it is winter and it snowed. Staring into windows, not to be a spy, but looking for something certainly, they will see a burning light and think yes, that is home.