Fear scathed me as I felt his presence encase my chest again. He closed in on my heart as you came closer. You were closer than you'd ever been, but so was he. From the start I'd known that you carried him. If you were anything like me, that was bound to happen; but I'd hoped our passion would be enough to drive him away. Seemingly not.
Our love was different from the ones we'd read before. We knew of 'fated lovers', 'tragic lovers', 'right person, wrong time'. We were simultaneously all of these tropes whilst fitting none of the parameters for them. We were complicated but so incredibly simple. Our love was thick with passion but drawn so precariously thin to the point where it was bound to collapse in on itself. And collapse, it did. It was a bridge carrying entirely too much weight. A young love ghosted by Fear himself, in the place he knew best.
We were Scared and Confused, both drawn to each other in ways that neither of us saw coming nor were prepared for. I wasn't a person anybody would pick in a crowd for being as scared as I was. I was a beacon of suffering, yes, but after years of living with Fear, I learnt to carry myself in a way that would outwardly show pure comfort. He'd melded himself to my bones in a way that I could live with.
You were less of a beacon, more of a symbol. A symbol of somebody so sure of herself that she didn't need anybody to confirm nor deny who she was. You connected with outsiders from a distance. This time you came too close to the edge of freedom and burned yourself in the process. You couldn't have it all.
We were both connected by Fear. Fighting wars against ourselves and everybody else while letting him get away with the pain he caused. Neither of us made an entirely wrong decision but neither of us were pure. There is no purity in words. Less so ours.
I was Scared. I didn't want to face the fact that I was hiding. Hiding from my own sense of lost security. I met with Confusion. In you I found a girl who desperately needed some sort of escape from the tethers she felt there was no escape from. I was trying to fight fire with gasoline; expecting you to bring some sort of stability to me.
I doubt I brought any sort of stability to you. I turned your life upside down for a moment - a blender filled with strawberries and blood, topped with the dread of a life being missed somewhere else. I wrapped my hands around your heart and made you choose between comfort and chaos while you put your lips against mine and told me to never get used to it. You filled my heart just to tear it out of my chest - mutilated. You replaced it with the baggage you wanted so badly to get rid of. You couldn't hear me when I'd told you that I'd been hurt one too many times before.
That day that you decided to know me - why? Why did you wrangle yourself from Fear's grip to tell me that you loved me? That every time you saw me you wished you could kiss me or that I made you feel something you thought you were willing to ruin everything for? You know the others wouldn't be able to understand you if you told them how you felt. I was terrified that what we had wasn't enough to keep him away. I was terrified that by the time I could control Fear grappling my throat, he would find you again.
He did. And in doing so he left me to fall in on myself; searching for you at any chance that I could.
At that point, I didn't know a whole lot. But I knew our story. I knew that we started as nothing to each other. A faint white noise in a room full of people. Surely that noise must've grown over time? Grown enough to drown out the shouts from Fear about how you and I could never be. It must have grown enough to tell you that maybe things could be better if we found each other for comfort; rather than resorting to what we knew.
If that noise hadn't grown, you wouldn't know that the rush of potential happiness tastes like strawberry lollies or that your skin could be stained like mine with the glow of spring sun and the absence of Fear.
But then somebody turned the volume down for you. You couldn't hear me anymore but my heart had just started beating at the same pace as yours. In my ideal version of this story, I would have latched onto that connection at the first hint of it, we would have left together and let all the different flavours of Fearless love paint each other's soul with a passion that even the darkest corners of the world couldn't drown out. But I was too late. You'd already been convinced that that life wasn't worth clawing through layers of comfortable pain to experience. I hated you for that. Despite the sense it makes, I still do.
You loved every moment of us. But in this world that meant that we had to do things in a new way. You couldn't blend in anymore. There's no blending in when you connect with someone who makes you glow like I managed to. Those days were beautiful but fraught. You felt like nothing could hold you back before the ringing of yesterday came back to you. You might have left Fear, but he knew that somebody like you would be easy to draw back in.
I wanted to save you from Fear so badly that I hadn't even considered the fact that maybe you didn't want to be freed. Maybe you understood that things could be better without him but the baggage of change was too much for you to handle. Fear held you back, sure; but was leaving him worth carrying his weight around forever?
You decided it wasn't. I looked away for a moment while you fell back into his arms. He choked you to death in that place. Nobody said breaking free was easy but nobody warned you how hard it would be.
So maybe we did fit those tropes? We were something right that felt astronomically wrong. We didn't fit in any particular setting so we tried all of them - landing on one which cements us as separate souls.
I needed a home that you couldn't give to me. So I was let go again to become a martyr in a world that didn't want me enough.
Fear festered in our love. He grew there and he thrived in that space of chaos and the world around us only encouraged him. Your lips met mine that day but so did he. He re-entered my soul and bound himself to my heart. He weighs on me like the love we never got to share with each other. You would fade into the place you'd come from; another taxidermy heart on display for the others like us.
I'll keep fighting him. You keep hiding.
