How much of myself can I reveal before you know too much, my love? If I tell you I am frightened, will you think I am too weak to keep you safe? If I tell you I am sad, will you think I cannot lift you up in your times of sorrow? If I tell you I am tired, will you think I lack the strength to hold us together?

There is a calculation I run, late at night, that I do not think you know about. I weigh each piece of myself against what it might cost. The fear goes in one pan, and on the other pan I place the picture of me you carry — the steady one, the one who is fine, the one you reached for because he could be reached for — and I watch the scale, and I keep the fear in my pocket for another day.

I do not know when this began. I think it began before you. I think it was already running when I met you, and meeting you only gave it something larger to protect. To be loved is, it turns out, a more difficult thing than to be unloved, because to be loved is to have something one cannot afford to lose, and the easiest way to keep from losing it, the arithmetic whispers, is to keep some of yourself out of the room.

You are not my first love, and in my youth, I believed that love could conquer all, even my own human frailties. I wanted my first love to see and love the whole of me, even to peer in the dark corners. That is how I learned that the love of any man is conditional, because a man is only loved for his utility. The frightened part, the sad part, the tired part — these are not useful. These are the parts that get set down at the side of the road when the one who was carrying them grows weary, and the carrying ends, and the carried one is left standing in the road wondering what part of him was the thing she had loved.