I’m starting to understand why I feel the way that I feel right now. For as long as I can remember I’ve always been one to wear my heart on my sleeve, and I’ve always been someone that loves really hard, I give it my all, and I fight long passed one ideally should, I fight when any other man would have walked away and tended to his wounds. Instead I keep fighting, while the wounds I have become infected with an infatuated and insane inability to just walk away. I fight. That’s what I do, only this time I realised that I just can’t anymore, I just don’t have the capacity to anymore. I have far too many wounds to tend to and now my heart is under lock and key. I’m coming to the realisation that I never want to wear it on my sleeve again and I never want to give it to anyone again, and I probably never will, not all of it anyway.
My heart has belonged to one woman for the past 6 years. She took half of it when she asked me who the hell I was, and I told her I’d be whoever the hell she wanted me to be. And the other half when we were on the phone, long into the early hours of the morning, the night before she was due to leave and start a new life in a whole other continent, she said my name, the way only she says it. Paused for a second, then stuttered “I… I… I…” before saying she loved me and the let out a sigh, and I said it back, and it sounds weird but I heard her smiling, that beautiful, amazing, captivating smile. Moments after which, she cried, and so did I, I remember because that’s the only recollection of happy tears I have, and probably the only recollection I will ever have.
But the thing is those are two pleasant memories among dozens of unpleasant, venomous, stinging ones, and now I feel nothing. I used to miss her voice everyday that I didn’t hear it, I used to think about her every single day and now I don’t, all of those feelings gone just like that, into thin air, and well, it’s not worth it. She should never have had my heart, and I should not have been so foolish to give it so easily. But they say you can’t chose who you fall in love with, or when you fall in love, I guess that’s one of the things I hate about love, but then again it’s what makes love so beautiful. The thing is I just can’t anymore. From her I learnt that it’s possible to keep your heart guarded, to make it harder for love to surprise you and take you prisoner, you can keep your heart under lock and key, you can protect it, at least for longer than you can by wearing it on your sleeve, perhaps love finds its way into even the tightest of locked chests, but you can prolong your plight by not letting it fall off your sleeve at the sigh of a smile. And you can make it so that part of your heart always remains your own.