The Second Time

7 (pt. iv) (the prologue)

You take every ounce of my emotion in your hands and shred it to pieces right in front of me. I watch in silence as you throw me to the ground and forget me; there is nothing more for me to say.

I do not know how it came to be this way. I was teetering but so sure - and yet this has knocked me over. Your eyes speak truths that you would never say, and I thought that would be enough.

I wish I could go back and change my reactions to you. Wish I could reduce their intensity so that I could have been everything that would have caught your attention. But your force is too much - it took everything I had to stay standing. There was never much left over.

I wish I had been stronger. I wish my mind would not succumb to these petty games and worthless stress. I wish I could have been effortless in showing you the person that I am in the same way that I am effortless with the world, but you throw me off balance. I was the first one to fall, and so I lost.

Your effect on me is titanic. Never in my life has any one person influenced me in this way, to this degree. I am furious and enchanted and cannot stop hoping, longing for the simple chance to prove to you that my being is not confined to what you may see. I am more than another person in the room - I am not another blank pair of eyes and I do not possess a one-sided, opinionless outlook. I challenge you in the field of the unique and I am not sure you see me, blinded by the simple and the known.

I took a risk in my attempt to understand you, and it has drained me. You are and always will be the undefined and you have pulled me in, but perhaps your light is too bright for someone like me to withstand. (It is. It burned me.)

You have consumed my thoughts for far too long, used up my feelings and left me exhausted. This sacrifice has come at too high a price, and it is a price that I am no longer willing to pay.

Each time I see you, the wounds sting. Each word you speak pushes into them, burns and burns and burns. You are the precarious balance between the creative and the destructive, and the scale has tipped the wrong way - the pain outweighs the rest.

We have no grand finale, no epilogue, no last dance, no celebratory fireworks. Our entire existence was enough of an explosion.

But. 

Amongst the shower of golden rain that we left behind I think I am beginning to recover a small piece of myself, watering the dried-up patches of my core and sowing the New that you have given way to. I can now continue the ever-fruitless, always-satisfying pursuit of the horizon, and you will someday remain an ever-inspiring, ever-remarkable, always-magnificent spark in my mind. The burned streaks you have left behind are not forever. The scars now sting and the pain now outweighs the rest -- but they will heal, and the scale will fall back into balance. Of that, I am sure. 

What goes up must come down.

(All of this and still, I am glad I know you. That, I would never change.)