“Most people fall in love like rain; I fall like wreckage.”—Emily Slatin

Most people fall in love like rain—soft, steady, the kind that gently soaks in over time. They ease into it, step by step, trusting that each drop will collect into something nourishing. I never learned that kind of love. I don’t fall like a gentle rain; I crash headfirst. When I fall in love, I fall like wreckage.

There’s nothing gradual about the way my heart attaches itself to someone. For me, love has always arrived with the force of a building collapse. One moment I’m standing on solid ground, and the next I’m in free-fall, the world I knew reduced to splinters around my feet.

Maybe it’s the trauma talking—the part of me that learned early on that nothing safe stays. Or maybe it’s just how I’m wired, with an intensity that doesn’t know how to love in half measures. I only know that when my feelings ignite, it’s all at once. Immediate. Total. And it tends to leave a mark.

I was sixteen the first time I fell that hard. I brought a girl home to meet my parents, youthful and stupidly brave, thinking I could have honesty and safety at the same time. I was wrong. Loving her cost me the roof over my head. One afternoon I had a family; by nightfall I had a duffel bag, a broken heart, and nowhere to go.

My parents decided that their idea of me mattered more than my happiness, so I left home in a flurry of slammed doors and shattered trust. My whole life was suddenly reduced to what I could carry and what would carry me—clothes, a few keepsakes, and my dog curled up in the passenger seat of my beat-up Honda. I learned that day that love can bring the house down, literally and figuratively. And yet, if you asked me whether I regret it, I’d tell you no. That love was real, and even though it arrived like a lightning strike and ended in wreckage, I’d live it all over again. Because it was mine.

Trauma taught me young that every bright thing comes with a shadow. I’ve lived through things that other people only see on the news—pulled bodies out of mangled cars, walked through the ashes of someone’s burned-down life, pressed my hands against hemorrhaging wounds praying the bleeding would stop. I spent years as a rescue worker, surrounded by sirens and chaos, so I know what it means to hold onto hope in the middle of devastation.

Maybe that’s why I never learned to fear the crash that comes with love. I’ve seen buildings fall, and people break beyond repair. I’ve learned that safety is a luxury, a temporary lull that can disappear in an instant. So when my heart finds something worth holding, I hold on tight, and damn the consequences. I don’t know how to tiptoe into love any more than I know how to tiptoe into a collapsing building. I was built for fire and free-fall, not for hesitation.

Being intersex and queer in a world that likes its categories neat and tidy only added fuel to the fire. My very existence started as a battle—I was born with a body that didn’t fit the mold, and I grew up knowing that being myself could cost me everything. When you’re told again and again that you’re too different to be loved, you either break, or you rebel. I rebelled the only way I knew how: by loving exactly who I wasn’t supposed to, with every piece of me. And yet, I still lived the all-American girl life since day one.

As a teenager I fell for girls with the kind of intensity that would scare most people. I had to fight just to claim my own name and identity; falling in love was another fight, another free-fall off the edge of what everyone told me was acceptable. I never did anything by halves, and love was no exception. If I was going to be damned for who I cared about, I figured I might as well care with my whole heart.

That kind of all-or-nothing intensity carries its own scars. I’ve been told more times than I can count that I’m too much—too intense, too honest, just too everything. Maybe they’re right. I know my brand of love isn’t easy. I know it can be overwhelming to be on the other side of someone like me, someone who runs hot and never really cools down.

I’ve tried to tone it down before, to do the slow-and-steady routine that seems to come so naturally to others. Once, I even stayed in a relationship for nearly twenty years, thinking if I just held on and behaved myself, I could make it work like “normal” people do. It didn’t. Quiet resentment can wreck a home just as surely as a five-alarm fire. In the end, I left that relationship with the same sudden urgency as I do everything else—because I couldn’t stand living in something that was already burned-out inside.

When I met Amelia Phoenix Desertsong, the woman who would become my wife, I felt that old familiar plunge. We met in the unlikeliest of ways (online, of all things), and it didn’t take long for late-night conversations to turn into an unshakable bond. We were two people who had seen our share of broken things, two independent souls who weren’t looking for rescue—and we collided like two stars caught in each other’s gravity.

I fell fast, probably faster than I should have. She moved to Vermont to be with me before either of us could overthink it. We got married on our own terms, with no elaborate fanfare, just a quiet vow between us on a spring day. Our love is real, even if it doesn’t follow anybody’s blueprint. Loving her is the closest I’ve come to feeling safe, but even then, it’s a safety we carve out one day at a time, fully aware of how fragile life can be.

Here’s the truth: no matter who you are, safety is never guaranteed. Not in life, not in love. I’ve held people in my arms as the light left their eyes. I’ve said goodbye to friends who promised forever and meant it, but forever still wasn’t long enough. I know every time I say “I love you,” it might be the last time. Perhaps the greatest lesson I’ve learned in life is to never delay letting people know exactly what they mean to you, because you will regret not telling them once it’s too late.

Maybe that knowledge is why I refuse to hold back. I live with my heart on my sleeve and an emergency bag packed, hoping for the best while planning for the worst. Most people can afford to fall in love like a gentle rain, believing in tomorrow without a second thought. I envy them, in a way. But I don’t know that life. I only know that I will love with the same intensity that’s gotten me through every fire and every storm—completely and without apology.

Most people fall in love like rain; I fall like wreckage. It’s not pretty or gentle, and it sure as hell isn’t graceful. Loving the way I do means bracing for impact. It means understanding that something in me will break every single time I give myself away. But it also means I get to feel it all—the rush, the heat, the undeniable truth that I am still alive enough to crash and burn, and heal, and crash again. I’ve come to realize that I’m okay with breaking, as long as it’s for something real. I’ve been through worse and survived. A broken heart won’t kill me; playing it safe just might.

So yes, I fall hard, I fall fast, I fall like a collapsing roof with the sky on fire. I know no other way. I carry my trauma, my identity, my history like a toolbox, and when love calls, I pry open the wreckage with my bare hands looking for the little glimmer of life underneath. I’ve never been one to wait out the storm—I am the storm. And if that means I come crashing down, then so be it. At least I know every piece of me that falls will tell a story. At least I know I didn’t hold back.

I wasn’t meant for soft rain and safe landings. I was built for the wreckage, and I’ve learned to love within it. In a world that offers no guarantees, I will love the only way I know how—without restraint, without fear of the fall. It’s messy and it’s painful and it’s mine. And if I’m being honest, I wouldn’t trade my wreckage for all the gentle rain in the world.