Tags
boy, front door, girl, healing, heart, home, house, love, original work, poetry, prose, spilled ink, waiting
Someday you’re going to be standing on your front porch and there will be a boy standing in front of you and you are going to have to decided whether or not to let him in. Your house is too big for only you to live in. You can fill it up with friends for a while but eventually they will have to go home to their own homes with people who are counting down the minutes until they return.
You’ll be face to face with a man who stares at you with kind eyes and a hopeful smile and you are going to want to ask him to come in for late night coffee. You’re going to have to look him in the eye and wait for his answer and even if he answers yes before you finish asking the question, it’s still going to feel like you are waiting for three years.
When you let him through the door, he’s going to see your mess. He’ll see the old magazines stacked on the coffee table with dog ears on the pages and he will see the trashcan overflowing with crumpled pieces of papers with words you don’t want him to see. He wander over to your bookshelf and trace the bindings leisurely as he tries to find your backstory along the titles of the worn out books.
You have to continue inviting him in. And each time you will be more comfortable with hearing the sound of his bare feet padding along the halls and into different rooms. You will look forward to the nights you hear a knock on the door and the taste of late night coffee.
But you have to know, as you get more comfortable with him coming into your home, he is going to become more comfortable coming in. He is going to start doing things around the house and cleaning things up that you thought were never going to get picked up or put back together. You must let him do these things. He doesn’t think that you are incapable of cleaning up the messes, but he’s here and he wants to do it.
Someone is going to care a lot about you someday and he is going to want to make your life easier in any way that he can. Even the mundane. This boy cares about you. So let him care for you. You will not lose an ounce of your fierce independence—he wouldn’t take that away from you when it was what drew him to you in the first place—but you are learning that you can still depend on someone to walk into your messy house and not run away. Someone who will sit on the couch and drink coffee with you and listen to your rambling, unguarded thoughts.
And that, is worth opening the front door to let him in.