Cobalt Heart

Love. That word never felt real to me growing up—not in the way movies made it look, not in the way the women in my family whispered about it while lighting candles and praying over the Bible.

Love was something I chased, something I begged for, always feeling like I was either too much or not enough.

I was born to a woman who never really wanted to be a mother. I think she wanted to love me, but she also wanted her freedom, the youth she lost when she got pregnant at nineteen. She carried me into the world alone. My grandmother shut the door in her face the moment she found out. But when I was born, my grandmother was there, hovering, offering advice neither of us had asked for. She criticized the way my mother fed me, held me, raised me. She loved me in her own way, but it was a love that carried the weight of obligation.

Maybe that’s why my mother resented me.

She tried to have it all—college, late nights, chasing the life she felt she deserved. I understand now why she held on so tightly to her youth. No one wants to spend their early twenties elbow-deep in baby formula when they could be out living. But even as she tried to outrun motherhood, I was still there, a quiet shadow, a reminder of the path she never chose. Part of the package she wished to return with no receipt.

There were boyfriends. Different faces, different voices. Some were polite, others barely acknowledged me. When she was happy, I could breathe a little easier. When she was in love, she was softer, distracted. But when things fell apart, I felt the shift. The way she moved through the house, heavier, distant, as if I had suddenly become more noticeable. As if, in the absence of someone else, she remembered I was still there.

If I upset her, she wouldn’t yell or ground me. That would have been too simple. Instead, she delivered an award-worthy performance as a mother who no longer had a daughter, her silence filling the house, louder than words. Sometimes it lasted hours, sometimes days.

I tried to fix it by cleaning, keeping my distance, apologizing even when I didn’t know what I had done wrong. But her silence was a wall I could never break. A punishment worse than anything else.

Then, without warning, she would speak again, as if nothing had happened. No explanation. No acknowledgment. Just normal.

She wasn’t cruel, not in the way some mothers can be. She made sure I had food, clothes, school. But there was always distance. Always a wall.

Love in my home was silent, felt in the meals placed before me and the roof over my head. It was endurance, learning not to ask for more. Never soft or steady. Always something that could be given and taken away.

I remember sitting under the moon as a child, whispering my prayers, asking the universe why love felt like something I had to earn. I wanted to give it, all of it. But when I reached for it, I was needy. When I wanted warmth, I was selfish. When I dreamed of something different, I was delusional.

But I believed in love. Even after everything.

And that belief almost destroyed me.

At twenty-three, I thought I had found it. I got married, believing love could be healed, that it could be rewritten if I just poured enough of myself into it. If I gave enough, maybe I could make it soft. Maybe I could make it stay.

Two months in, love turned into pain, fear, and silence. Love became the way my body flinched, the way I learned how to disappear into myself. I started making excuses for him, the way women do when they want to believe in something that isn’t there. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe if I just try harder, be better, he won’t be so angry.

But love, real love, doesn’t need excuses.

I packed my bags, left with nothing but my name, and never looked back.

About half a year later, I found someone else. The relationship lasted five years, long enough for me to believe that maybe, just maybe, it could turn into something real. But deep down, I knew it never would. There was no promise of stability, no talk of marriage, only his constant insistence that he wanted kids.

When I told him about my fears, about how I didn’t want a child but a safe home, a foundation, something stronger than the kind of love I had grown up with, he didn’t listen. He brushed it off, told me I was overthinking, told me I was making excuses.

He didn’t understand that my hesitation wasn’t because I didn’t want to love a child. It was because I refused to bring one into the same uncertainty I had grown up in. But to him, my caution felt like rejection. A denial not just of the idea of a child, but of him. He took it personally, as if my fear was a statement about his worth rather than a reflection of my past.

And so I left.

At twenty-nine, I stood in front of my reflection, a woman shaped by everything I had survived. Love wasn’t something you earned. The only thing I had earned was a sharp eye for red flags, though I still ignored them longer than I’d like to admit.

The fear I carried wasn’t mine. It was my mother’s, my grandmother’s. Women who had been told they weren’t enough unless they suffered for love. Women who had learned to swallow their needs and mistake pain for devotion.

I wasn’t cursed. I wasn’t broken.

I was healing.

I thought of my mother’s warning. If you ever have a child, you’ll lose me forever.

And for the first time, I knew the truth. If love came with that kind of price, it was never love to begin with. Only control in disguise.

I didn’t have to repeat the patterns. I didn’t have to carry the wounds of the past into the future.

I still wanted to give love without conditions. But now, I knew something I hadn’t before.

I deserved to receive it too.

So I prayed. I asked for peace, for healing, for a love that didn’t have to be earned.

As I closed my eyes, I saw it. Cobalt.

The color of my heart. Deep. Strong. Unshaken. The color of the ocean, of intuition, of a love that is endless and true.

A love, finally, for me.