Perfect fool.

We survive.

It’s all we can hope for. The world crashes down around us and relationships fall apart and people die and pets go missing and jobs are lost and we come apart at the seams, but somehow, somehow we sew ourselves back together, over and over again. Life finds a way. Living is all we know how to do.

I like to think I’ve crafted a pretty cozy life for myself. After years of struggling, I cobbled together an existence that includes a roof over my head, wheels under me to get me to a respectable job; I talk to my neighbours and text all day with friends and parents. I walk the dog, we play fetch, he whines too much and I tell him to go lie down, but at night he cries at the head of the bed and I lift the covers up so he can dive underneath and snuggle against my left side and I am content. I am happy.

Despite all this, things can go so terribly wrong so swiftly. (I’m stating the obvious, of course; that life is fragile and there is nothing I can do to make it less tenuous, less fleeting.) I can be having a benign conversation with my beau across the bar and in minutes, the tone can become truculent, the mood can go south and I can be standing, feeling utterly alone, over my sink with a piece of broken glass, trying to ignore the reality that no matter how far I’ve come I can return to square one in mere moments. All of the old habits, all of the old self-hatred and isolation, can come rushing back — a flash flood rising around my waist and threatening to drown me.

Yes, dear one. Life is fragile and there is no one to really trust, no one who won’t leave, who won’t lie or betray you, because people are imperfect by design. Call it original sin, call it human nature, but we are built to fail, to fall apart, to rise up just to come crashing down. We are the definition of planned obsolescence. Like our iPhones and our cars we are made to be outmoded, we are made to die, we are built to self-destruct after too many knocks, from being dropped too many times or from repeated crashing into walls. Your perfect olive skin, your lovely eyes, your strong hands and the furnace of your body heat — you will grow frail and old and cold and bitter. Yet I still love you for all that you are, and all that you will no longer be.

To love you is the definition of setting myself up to fail. You will die one day. You may die tomorrow. You will accuse me of duplicity. You will snap at me when you lack sleep, you will pick up your keys and storm out of the room when things come to a breaking point. We may have children. We may lose a child. Our mutual tragedies may cement us together or tear at the fabric of the soft, warm thing we’ve stitched together. I will cry too much, and you will call me names, and I will be cruel and withdraw with the ice of a thousand winters as retaliation, and you will say things like, “This is why I never trusted you,” and you words will be swords in my body. But I wouldn’t trade it.

We all know the worst case scenarios. We’ve played it over and over again in our minds, because we are masochistic and it gives us a sick satisfaction, like ripping open a blister or squeezing something we love a little too hard, until it cries out in pain. And so? What have we gained from worst case scenarios? How do we benefit when the ghosts of our selves howl in our ears, drowning out the present, drowning out the way we whisper I Love Yous to each other in the dark? Demons live everywhere. Short of building round rooms to eliminate the corners in which they hide, there is nothing to be done. Like spiders in the basement, we will wander into errant cobwebs every once in a while. You cannot control the webs that are built. You can only acknowledge them and brush yourself off and continue on your path.

Trust in another person, is by nature, naive and blind and stupid. But it is the first card of the Major Arcana, after all: it is beautiful to be a fool. Imagine, being unjaded by the joys and pains that you’ve lived a hundred times before. To love anew. To emerge from a chrysalis into a new love and believe, truly believe, that nothing will go wrong. We think we are strong because we cut ourselves off from others, we steel ourselves from past pains and competing histories and the wraiths of old lovers and dull hatred, but we are cowards for building walls. The human experience is to feel the spectrum of emotions and to love unabashedly, despite the ills of other people and their potentially cruel hearts.

I want to be brave. That is how you make love stay. With strength. With courage. With patience. So stay a while. Rest.