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Sometimes I feel like I can only come at my emotions sideways: I’ve been talking about old boyfriends a lot, so I must be feeling insecure. I’ve been jealous lately, so what am I afraid of losing? And to whom, or what, or why?

The ability to recognize jealousy as a flag for other, deeper emotional issues is something I’m proud of having, and a skill that comes in useful far more often than I’d like. But all emotion is human, and good or bad only designations we assign.

Still, that doesn’t help me from feeling bad when my roommate and I plot the death of my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.

I am not, nor will I ever be entirely free from malice, insecurity, and back again to fear. Just a halfway shot at good enough, and that’s only if I figure out how bow my head to the greater beauty, only if I figure out how to be thankful for what I’ve got.

Picture it: full moon over a sharp landscape. It bristles full of prickly things, shining in the frost, but there is a ravine with clear sweet water running through. Under the shade of a swelling cottonwood, a tent holds us warm as a womb. We kiss softly as though too much passion might bring the full rage of the desert falling down around us, smile like a shared secret. But in the middle of the night I burn with doubt; what does it mean to be in love? What if I have fallen from it? What if I have not? I scold myself: be here now, but it does no good, has no chance against the wailing worrying mind. You wake, mumbling, reaching toward me, and I pretend to be asleep. It is shameful.

I should say: I cannot be here now, not in mind so not in body, I have to go. I should say that I am undecided and therefore unfair, that my center still lies too far off to the left. I am not all here, I am divided, I am sorry.

But, see, still I am selfish, and I want the narrow comfort of your arms and kisses, so I stay. And yes, of course, I do like you, but shameful nonetheless. And I have no excuse, except a weakness and the desire to prove to myself that I haven’t died. I’m afraid to let you go: what exactly is it that I am afraid of losing? Maybe just the chance to wake from a bad dream and have someone there to hold, someone to convince me that the shadows are merely ghosts. It doesn’t have to be love to be worth keeping.

Though for me, strangely, love always seems to come galloping up, each time taking me by surprise, each time different, a new facet of some bright crystalline thing. I open my arms, telling myself – telling everyone, including him – that I’m not interested in love this time, I just want some fun, I just want something to pass the time, and then one day I find myself in the midst of a kiss and the words hammering in my head, wiggling their way out around my tongue, I love you, and I am appalled. No, no of course appalled isn’t the right word: I am thrilled and stunned and grateful and amazed, but well maybe also a little appalled. Because this time, just this once, this time I was sure that I wouldn’t get tangled, that I would be able to sleep through the night, wake up calm, this time I wouldn’t get my heart broken at the end, this time I just wanted comfort and warmth.

It seems like, in my heart and mind, asking for less than everything is asking too much. I have already said that my tendency is towards indulgence rather than moderation: if it is true in chocolate, it is that much truer in love. It is the one place where I have no hope of doing things half way, where any attempt to moderate, to restrain or diminish, is destined to backfire dramatically into the sudden whispering of promises I had no idea I wanted to make, but do.

We are wrapped gingerly around each other, hesitant and new, and I reach my lips close to his ear. I say to him, Promise: do not love me. He laughs, says what will be will be, he kisses me, and I spiral away into the moment. But I meant it, futile and arrogant and unfair though it was, I meant it out of fear, out of the tight gripping fear that I will fall again and be broken.

Irony: Love is the biggest and most important thing in my life, and the mere idea of falling in love again is the biggest and most terrifying thing I can think of. More than any other single thing, I live for the encompassing, buzzing, electric energy of love, of new love, of all love, for the moments when I want to be so close to you that I would climb inside your skin if I could, when I would eat you, flesh and bone, just to get you inside of me. And the end of it crushes me every time.

I am feeling lonely lately: What keeps me from being my own company? What am I hiding from so that I can’t just sit and be content, here, in myself? What is it with which I am afraid to be alone?

There is a dragging feeling just behind my throat when I think about you, a heavy anticipating thrill against my breastbone. I very much want to see you.

But I am divided, yet, still tied to the pasts I can’t find the right ways to forgive, the fears I don’t know how to release. It all made sense in my head last night, but today I don’t know which words to use. I am still tangled in the memory of old lovers, and even more than that, still tangled in myself: I don’t want to be with you only to avoid being alone, and I don’t want to be with you only to fill myself with that feeling.

Perhaps I need to hermit for a while: take myself up into the mountains and sit in a cave until I figure out why I shy away from the honesty I want so badly, why I hurl myself headlong into one love while I’m still wearing the sweatshirt I stole from the last one, while I’m still recovering, reeling from the shock of sudden ground.

I should tell you: This is for the best, I’m not here, now, I’m not ready, I need to be alone. But I will want to kiss you, and I will kiss you, and even if I say those things I will say them while I’m kissing you, and I will want you to stay. Shameful. But true.

The challenge is to be as honest about that as anything else. There’s no point in pretending to be more enlightened than I am: it defies itself. Besides, as they say in the twelve-step programs and all over, the first step in addressing a problem is identifying it: I am selfish and I do not want to be alone.

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