Pitfalls of a Brave Heart

You were in love.

Nothing can diminish that.

You gave your heart to another, trusted them to keep it and gave your word that you would be true, because you were. You took them at their word because you believed in something, someone, other than yourself.

Nothing can belittle the courage that took.

Even if that love wasn’t returned on anything more than a superficial level. 

Perhaps the other person wasn’t capable of giving you any more than that.

Loving when the love is returned in equal proportion is, one would assume, an easier task—though still daunting, I’m sure. Such responsibility.

Yet, you loved.

You may feel your relationship was built on, and destroyed by, lies. Though, to be honest with yourself, it was the truth that dealt the final blow. The lies just weakened it enough to make it a fatal one.

Maybe the one you loved gave their heart, body and soul to another, and then, another, while still smiling at you and telling you they loved you because that was what was easiest for them.

Still, you loved.

It may have been that their lies and cheating made you lose yourself. Your pain made you hurtful, your insecurity made you jealous, the person who’d brought out the best in you suddenly brought out the worst. You may have felt shattered, ground down, almost destroyed.

It’s okay. You loved.

If it’s easy to leave, you had no place being there to begin with.

If the wound takes years to heal because it cut as deeply as you felt, that is to be expected.

Sometimes the forest needs to burn to make way for new growth.

If the love you thought true turned out to be an illusion, but the void it left was real and you fell into it, and it into you, and the darkness still threatens to consume, hold on, you’ll get through.

Because, you loved.

If you feel that the person you fell in love with never truly existed. Not as you thought you knew them. That they were only playing a cruel game of pretended. If the marriage ended in divorce or you had the vows dissolved by an annulment but like salt in water it isn’t really gone, the water is just left undrinkable, try and recall how sweet it tasted before it was tainted. That was all you. 

You were the one who loved.

That fact shall remain.

You gave your heart to another, trusted them to keep it and gave your word that you would be true, because you were.

Nothing can ever belittle the courage that took.

Nothing can diminish that.

Someday, when your courage returns, so will love. An older love. A wiser love. One that is equally brave.

If it doesn’t, that’s okay, too.

Because you loved.

And no one can take that from you.

A Box Called Freedom

Why do you seek to control me?

Why not instead try to understand me?

I wish I could understand you.

But you speak little of yourself 

and instead talk about 

all that is wrong with me.

You seem to count that as one of your virtues.

You don’t tell me what you believe, 

you tell me what I believe. 

Then you dismantle it. 

Controlling both sides of the argument.

It is an exercise in vanity, 

not critical thinking.

Regardless of what others have told you, 

what you heard and are repeating with 

confidence and conviction, 

you are only saying 

what you believe 

I believe 

not what 

I actually believe.

In pointing out 

what you think is 

my ignorance 

you are,

in fact, 

revealing your own.

We may speak, but we have not spoken.

You say my world is small,

but you see a mere fraction of it,

only what your blinders allow, 

as you safely peek out of your box

— a box you named freedom.

You say I have no curiosity or wonder 

and yet when you talk at me 

I am curious 

as to how you can be so blind,

I wonder 

how to make you see.

Not to see as I see, 

but allow me to see differently than you 

and have you still acknowledge, 

perhaps even respect, 

my right to exist as my own person 

rather than being a reflection of you, 

who are just as much a product of your culture 

as you accuse me of being a product of mine.

Products can be so easily disposed of.

Not that I need your permission, 

which is something else 

you don’t seem to understand.