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I woke up in the middle of the night, crying, and the thought arrived. I had gone from trusting her infinitely to trusting nothing she says, and somewhere in between I stopped asking how that happened. When she tells me something now, my head goes looking for the lie in it, and for the thing she might be hiding. My heart agrees before she finishes the sentence. Her words never arrive as themselves.

Then I understood what trust had been doing all along. Trust is what the head and the heart do with what they hear. When there is trust, a sentence comes in and they take it as it is. They do not question it. They add to it. Thoughts come that agree with it, feelings come that hold it up, and the believing happens instantly, in the same breath as the words that caused it. Trust is not something you can touch. There is no object called trust sitting between two people that one of them can pick up and drop.

I trusted her with everything. The trust was in my head and my heart.

It was machinery, and time built it. All those years taught my head and my heart one habit, and the habit was to believe her. The time is different now. The habit is still here, so it points at whatever comes in, and what comes in now is pain. She says one sentence and my head stabs at it until it becomes the worst version of the sentence. Then it hands me that instead.

None of this happened outside me. Every part of it is inside, and inside is where it broke, and inside is where it keeps turning into hell. Whatever the days are like outside makes no difference to that.

Maybe that is what broken means.

The heart does not stop working. It beats the same as it always did, and it cannot do the work it used to do. It takes in the smallest thing and gives back blood. And I am still standing in that moment, loving her, unable to leave her, unable to untrust her.

I gave her everything and never asked for one thing back. I questioned nothing she told me. When something inside me doubted her, I took her side against it, every time, without thinking about it. Infinite trust made me blind in love, and the blindness felt like the purest thing I had ever done.

I trusted her over my own head and my own heart.

And the blow did not come from an enemy. It came through the one door I had left open, carried by the person I had put above my own judgement, which is the only way it could have reached anything that mattered.

That is the same machinery running me now. It has turned on me. I cannot trust my own head or my own heart about anything, because both of them are busy handing her back the pain she carried in when she broke us. Whatever they say, I end up hurt, and then she ends up hurt.

The machine inside me was built to make love. A small amount came in and a large amount went out, and everyone standing near me felt it. Years made it huge. The size was the gift. One kind word from her came back out of me as a hundred.

The machine that made love every moment of its life is making pain now.

The size is the problem. A small pain comes in. A plain thought comes in. A doubtful thought comes in. It stabs all of them until they bleed, through the heart, through the eyes. It takes whatever small thing it is given and hands back a hundred times more of it. The fuel is pain, and it makes its own fuel as it burns, and I have to live inside what it makes.

It worked the other way before. Anything that came in, good or bad or painful, was turned toward love. It came into that much love and left as trust, as understanding, and the person in front of me felt it without knowing why. The same angels are in there. They have new names now.

The angels of trust have become demons of doubt and misunderstanding.

The love is locked in, and something is standing over it. I beg for one small piece of care from her to break the lock. When it comes, the whole hell goes quiet and everything inside me stops. It is not enough. What is locked in there has been tortured for months, and one kind moment does not undo torture. It lasts a second. Then the machine starts again, reaching into every memory I have to rebuild itself, and the memories come back sharpened. Everything beautiful from before goes into the fire too.

The demons are not in one room. They have the head, the heart, and the whole body, and they walk through the memories taking whatever they find to use as fuel.

A little love, arriving steadily, for long enough. That would heal it. The angels would come back and the whole thing would run on love again.

It cannot happen. I cannot ask for it, and nobody loves a man who has a hell inside him, because whatever is given to him comes back as pain. Only hers would work anyway. My angels and my demons are hers. I do not crave anyone else. I crave her, and they crave her, and they turn everything I have into more of that craving.

And it is so hard not to believe it. The machinery is clever about it. It pulls out the old memories, sharpens them until they look like proof, and hands me everything new already stabbed. Keeping all of this inside me, and letting nothing I feel reach her, is the hardest thing I do all day. When I lose my hold on it, I lose myself.

I lost her, and I lost myself in her. There is not much left of me after those two.

My love for her is not less by a single electron. The trust, the understanding, the love. All three of them are in me, all three of them are still infinite, exactly as they were. What changed is that all three are working against me now, and there is no place outside me where they can go.

My whole body wants to lose her, to hate her, to hurt her, to leave her, to kill every part of her that lives in me. The hell is doing the talking. I spend my days keeping its hands off her.

So I have no way left to tell her I love her. Pain is all I have to express it. Crying is all I have to speak it. Tears are all I can give her.

The one part of me the pain cannot reach is the part that is hers.

My soul is the one thing they cannot touch. Everything else was taken over. This was not. It is still pure, still hers, still untouched by any of it. It is touched by love and by nothing else, and the only love that has ever touched it is hers. This morning it spoke to me. It told me to stop trusting my head and my heart, to keep all of this inside me, and to make sure that none of it reaches her.

My soul protects her from everything, including from me. Even now, with all of this inside me, I cannot hurt her. I cannot hate her. I cannot leave her. I cannot wish her anything less than everything. That is how much I love her.

When my soul cries her name, part of hers hears it, and she carries a guilt she cannot trace to anything. That is the only thing I send her now. Her soul does the same for mine. Mine protects her from losing me. Hers protects me from losing myself in her. Two souls doing the same work while the rest of us fight it.

One day her soul will let go of me, the way everything else let go. Her body is handing her love to someone else, and her soul is the last part still refusing. There will be nothing left of me anywhere she can hear it, and she will not hear my soul crying her name, and she will not see its tears. That day I will cry the loudest I have ever cried. I will not be able to bear it, and I will wish it took me.

People fall in love with their eyes first. Then their head, then their body, then their heart. The soul comes last, and most people never reach it in love. We did. You live inside my soul, and I know yours asks about me too.

So my soul is yours, and it will always be yours, and it will protect you from anything, including from me. That is the answer to the question you asked me, why I love you this much. You touched my soul and made it yours.