The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears, and delivers them out of all their troubles. The Lord is near to them that are broken hearted; and saves the contrite spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivers him out of them all. Psalm 34:17-19

Life will break your heart. Nothing and no one can protect you from it. Living alone won’t protect you. Putting up walls won’t protect you, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, you will never quite be the same as you were before the fall.

Through my experiences, I have found that you can’t turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you’ve created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can’t see it anymore. I thought I was starting to see, starting to reveal the camouflage so that I could start tearing the walls down.

But I was wrong. I don’t know if I can live without my walls. Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. My heart and stomach and my whole insides feel empty and hollow and aching. My eyes can’t seem to stop the flow of stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears. I pray without ceasing that the pain would disappear, appealing to heaven for respite from destroying the one I wholly love. I am missing a piece of myself, and this aching, gut wrenching emptiness has begun to take over.

Stab the body and it heals, but injure the heart and the wound lasts a lifetime. I’m not supposed to miss you. I’m not supposed to care. I wish I could just leave and be done with it. I don’t want to continue to coming back to a situation that I cannot bear to stay in. But even when I am gone, I am never really gone… and I won’t get over it if I keep coming back. Losing our love once was hard enough. And now it feels like everything’s coming back. And I know that I’m going to get screwed. And I can’t do it again. I am just not strong enough.

Sometimes I think that because I am obscure, plain and little, you perceive me as soulless and heartless? But you think wrong! I have as much soul as you and as much heart! And if God had only gifted me with some beauty, or brains, or something of value, maybe it would be as easy for you to love me as it is for me to feel so deeply about you.

I know that letting go is not as hard as holding on to something that isn’t real. But truly, at the end of the day, what the hell does it matter who I end up with if it can’t be you?

But I also have to ask, do I really want to stay on this road longer, knowing it will only end in devastation? If I love you more than you love me, I’m as good as dead. Yet I can’t make myself take it back. I can’t just walk away from you, because every time you pass by me without smiling, without touching my hand, or at least making eye contact, it feels like I’m dying inside. God only knows how much I’d love you if you let me, but I feel like I can’t break through at all.