On Recognizing Love

Peonies grow in The place inside my heart that Your love inhabits

I originally wrote this haiku about a beautiful friend of mine last year, back when I was pretty sure future love for me would be reserved for friends and family, and I'm still amazed (in a good way) that I was wrong. She helped me remember what real love looks like. Partly because of her, my life has been happy and complete without a romantic partner in it. It took time to get there, time to recover from toxic people who didn't deserve my emotional energy. I took a year long break from all dating, in fact, after a series of negative experiences. In the end, I don't know if it was worse to be stalked by a narcissist with borderline personality disorder or for another narcissist with borderline personality disorder to use that fact to his advantage (and then tell others that I was lying about the stalker). In some emotional ways, someone who I thought cared about me discrediting the negative experience was worse than act…