I used to love people by putting them in the sky.
Not consciously. I did not call it worship. I called it admiration, gratitude, loyalty, tenderness, romance, friendship, devotion. All the beautiful names. But the motion was the same: someone lit something in me, and I lifted them above the ordinary weather.
Up there, they were safe from disappointment.
Up there, they were not tired or selfish or confused or unfair. They did not need space in a way that hurt me. They did not forget to answer. They did not fail me. They were not allowed to be human, because their humanity threatened the temple I had built around them.
That sounds like love when you are young enough.
It is not love. It is fear with candles around it.
The first people I loved were almost holy to me. My mother and grandmother were not ideas; they were the ground. They fed me, protected me, worried over me, stayed. Whatever else was broken in the world, they were there. So some part of me learned this strange early theology: the people who love you are angels, and angels must not fall.
Later, when I loved someone, I brought the theology with me.
I did not want a person. I wanted proof that tenderness was real. I wanted a witness who could look at me and say: you are not bad, you are not dangerous, you are not alone.
This is an unfair job to give a human being.
The people I love are not medicine.
They are not courts.
They are not gods.
They are not mirrors.
They are people. Specific, tired, contradictory people. They can be warm at noon and distant by evening. They can love me and still need silence. They can be brilliant and wrong. They can be generous and tired. They can be kind and still say no.
If I do not allow that, I am not loving them. I am loving the role they play in my private mythology.
Idealization has a cruelty inside it. From far away it looks flattering. You are perfect. You are different. You are not like the others. You are light. You are magic. You are the exception.
But a pedestal is still a cage.
When I put someone above me, I also make it dangerous for them to come down. Every ordinary movement becomes a fall. Every boundary becomes betrayal.
Then I grieve the loss of a creature I invented and call the grief love.
I do not want that anymore.
I want to love people on the ground.
The ground is harder. The ground has dishes, traffic, anxiety, unanswered messages, bodies, bills, and awkward mornings. But the ground is also where hands can touch. It is where someone can sit across from you tired and still be beloved. It is where a no can be heard without becoming a catastrophe.
The people I love are allowed to be human.
They are allowed to have edges.
They are allowed to not know what they feel yet.
They are allowed to need me and not need me.
They are allowed to be inconsistent without becoming false.
They are allowed to be loved without being responsible for saving me.
And I am allowed the same mercy.
That part matters too. If I make everyone I love into an angel, I quietly make myself into the creature outside heaven, trying to earn entry by being useful enough, funny enough, patient enough, harmless enough.
But love is not supposed to be a visa office.
It is not a border checkpoint between the worthy and the unworthy. It is two imperfect beings choosing reality over mythology.
Sometimes the light in a person is real. I do not want to become cynical about that. Some people really do arrive like a window opening in a room you forgot had air. Some people carry a warmth that teaches your body something before your mind has words for it.
I still believe in that.
I just do not want to confuse light with perfection.
Stardust is not clean. It is old fire and exploded matter. Maybe that is why it is beautiful: not because it never broke, but because it broke so completely that one day it entered a human hand, a human face, a human laugh.
The people I love are made of that.
Not altar stone.
Stardust.
So I want to love them with my eyes open. To see the tiredness and still make tea. To see the boundary and not punish it. To see the flaw and not turn it into a verdict. To see the person, not the projection.
This is less dramatic than worship.
Harder too.
But kinder. To them, because they can finally breathe. To me, because I can stop kneeling.
The people I love are allowed to be human.
And if I can remember that, maybe I can finally love them well.
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