This Body is Bullshit

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Matt met me when my life was already fully unhinged. Single mom, unprocessed trauma, chaos as a default setting, baggage I hadn’t even inventoried yet. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t try to fix me or make me easier to love. He just stepped in and stood there — quietly, patiently, without needing to be the hero of anything.

He still does.

He does the laundry. Takes care of the yard. Vacuums without being asked. Does more than his share and doesn’t need a trophy for it. That kind of consistency is its own love language — not the grand gesture kind, just the steady everyday kind that quietly makes everything feel safer.

He’s more emotional than I am, which I did not see coming and did not think I needed. But he balances me. He doesn’t always say things out loud — words aren’t really his thing — but just by being who he is, he’s helped me slowly unlearn the habit of performing fine when I’m clearly not. He makes me laugh constantly. He tells dad jokes I pretend to groan at. He is, annoyingly, unfairly good-looking. I now know more about the Grateful Dead than I ever planned to. I’ve watched golf. That’s love.

He goes to bed early, wakes up early, and has somehow become a person who doesn’t need much — good coffee, a dog nearby, and me ideally not spiraling over something minor. He’s calm when I’m spinning. He shows up for the hard parts even when I don’t know how to let him in.

Here’s the part I don’t say out loud enough though.

Everything I’ve been through — cancer, sepsis, seven surgeries, scars, chronic pain, exhaustion that doesn’t really lift — it’s changed me. And it’s changed us. Especially in the quiet ways. The intimate ways. I miss how easy it used to feel. I miss spontaneity. I miss feeling confident in my own body without having to talk myself into it.

I don’t pull away from him. I want to be close. But I worry. I worry he doesn’t see me the same way. That he sees the fatigue and the pain and all the ways this body isn’t what it used to be. That maybe he misses the old me too, even if he’d never say it.

He has never once made me feel broken. But I feel broken sometimes. And I hate that he’s had to carry so much while I figure out how to feel whole again.

I want to give him everything — the spark, the ease, the version of me that didn’t second-guess herself constantly. We’re working on it. Both of us.

I don’t know if I believe in fate. But I believe he showed up at exactly the right time. Someone steady. Someone soft. Someone who wasn’t going to run when things got hard — and things got very hard.

He is home.

He’s always been home.

I just hope he knows how much I see him — even on the days I forget to say it.