I wanna be your “fuck you” man

I had a dream once, and in that dream I loved someone who was sick, who was dying.

She saw how difficult it was for me to tend her, and so, she told me to leave.
She told me it was OK to go.

These are the words I had for the woman in my dream.

“I want to run away,
like all those hard times in my past,
when I left a relationship
not because I stopped loving them
but because staying to love them
hurt too much.
But I don’t want to be that man for you.

I wanna be your ‘fuck you’ man.

Because I’m scared,
I’m so fucking scared.
And I want to run away again.
I want to run away
and hide
until the problem is gone,
but I won’t.
Because I don’t want to be that man anymore.
Because I want to stare down
that man and those feelings
and say,
‘Fuck you.’

I don’t want to be the man
who makes a terrible time of your life
even worse.
I want to be the best part
of the worst part of your life.
I want to stay by your side,
brave in spite of my fear,
strong in spite of both our weaknesses,
giving at a time in your life
when you need everything I can give you
and maybe then some.

I want to be one of two kinds of man:

I want to be the man
you can turn to
once all this is over,
years down the road,
the one with whom
you look back on it all and say,
‘Thank God you were there.
I don’t know how I would have made it through without you.’

Or if I can’t be that,
if God or fate,
disease or this shitty world
makes that impossible,
then I want to be the man
you look up to
from your deathbed and say,
‘Thank God you were there.
I don’t know how I would have made it through without you.’

So fuck you,
I’m not leaving.”

Loving someone can be hard.
Loving someone can be terrifying.
But love can be brazen and audacious.
Love can be as profane as it is profound.
And love…can be fucking stubborn.