To Whom My Heart Belongs To [original]

One

To someone I loved,

My heart skips a beat; my mind forgets to tell me to breathe. My legs become paralyzed; my mind becomes frozen. Can you tell when I felt this way? As cliché as it may seem, that's how I felt when I saw you during the earlier days of my growing crush. You took my breath away, and I had no words to describe what I saw or how I felt. I hoped you were the only reason I would ever lose my breath, but you weren't.

Sometimes I can't breathe because I'm exhausted from all the work I've done. Sometimes I can't breathe because I'm holding my breath for something exciting. Sometimes I can't breathe because I'm laughing too much to catch my breath. But unfortunately, sometimes I can't breathe because I'm being pushed under the water. I'm unable to come up for a breath. So sometimes it's not that I can't breathe. In some situations, it's that I'm drowning.

While I've learned how to swim, I'm drowning in everything that is thrown at me. The weights drag me down deeper into the water. The water becomes murky, and it becomes harder to see the daylight above me. As more weights are put on me, I sink deeper and deeper into the water. My arms are unable to flail around and bring myself back up. My life may seem simple and particularly easy, but in truth, it's not. No one else actually knows what happened to me or what my story is. They may see what has happened from the outside, but my interior holds all the truths and information I've learned in my lifetime.

Everyone's story is different. No one will ever have the exact same one as anyone else. I don't know your journey, so I cannot judge you for that. And even though I say that, there are times when I still judge a book by its cover. I may not be the only one suffering, and others may be drowning in the same body of water as me.

I'm trying to remove the weights from my shoulders. I need to take another breath before I go under again. The process would be quicker if I had help, but it is my responsibility to bring myself up. I'm slowly coming back up. I don't know if I'll make it to the surface of the water before more weights are dropped on me, but I'm going to keep trying. As hard as it may seem, I know that I can reach the surface for a breath, but I am unaware of how long it will take before I drown.

With love,

someone who is trying to breathe