Loving Too Much
L paternoster
About the Author:
Laurie Paternoster is a former journalist whose poetry appeared in Roadrunner Review, Book of Matches, Rat Bag Lit Magazine and Orchards Poetry Journal. Honored in three Writer’s Digest competitions and by the Writer’s League of Texas, she was shortlisted in the 2025 Diann Blakely National Poetry Competition.
Loving Too Much
For Marcia
I never learned to love lightly.
No one taught me the language of enough.
I came to friendship with open palms,
set my heart down like an offering,
said: Take what you need. Take me.
We memorized each other’s joys and griefs,
held them like precious heirlooms,
polished them with attention.
I guess I showed up too fast, too fully,
with arms already wrapped around the future.
Women loving women as friends
is a unique kind of romance -
the bone-deep Wednesday sessions,
the shared sacred stories,
the way your laugh became a room
we wanted to live inside.
But love, when it has no doors,
becomes a flood,
need starts to sound like hunger.
Drowning begins to look like distance,
like unanswered messages, omitted invitations,
like someone choosing air.
We didn’t mean to lose each other.
We just loved past the edges of what could be held.
We mistook intensity for safety,
closeness for permanence,
forgetting that even devotion
needs room to breathe.
I carry you gently now
not as a wound, but as proof
that my heart is capable
of immense, aching tenderness.
Proof that loving friends this deeply
is not a mistake, even when it ends.
Some friendships are not meant to last.
They are meant to change us.