Of Battered Hearts & Bitter Coffee

To fall once more.

A love painted with the pretty colours of all those idealised stories of foolish women jumping into the arms of foolish men and dancing away to the horizon,
A relationship built on the dreams of princes and white horses,
A relationship started just because of those butterflies in their stomach, that drunken haze their brains were in as they lost themselves in a wild kiss,
A relationship steeped with expectations so extraordinary that neither partner were even worth the effort,

Their love was a ship of straw with sails of paper, sailing head on into a storm,
Wrecked so bad that even the hungry sharks wrinkled their noses and turned away,
They floated away to different islands to nurse their wrecked hearts,
Vowed in name of all the gods above and all the demons below that they wouldn't ever set sail in the ocean of love again,
Sailors,
Now anchored to the shore by their fear of pain and loss.

Naive children now turned to adults,
Hardened by life, withered by time,
Their love a ship drowned to the bottom of the sea,
Pulsing like a wild beacon, in the abyss between them,
Waiting for a chance to resurface, to reconnect,
A chance to fix the wreckage,
To make their ship stronger, to fix it with new peices of understanding and wisdom that their childish fantasies did not possess,
To prepare it for all the hardships that will inevitably come,
To build a mast that is unbreakable,
To sew sails that will withstand the most destructive of winds,
To build a wheel that allows two captains to steer it together,
To build a cabin that has enough place for discussion and perfect lines for communication,
To chart out a map and follow a compass that doesn't just show the easiest way out,
To set out on a journey that doesn't just end with a happy ever after, but begins with it,
To not narrow their vision to what they see through their binoculars, but to see the whole world in front of them,
To create a little world of their own, where they both can grow as individuals and as a team together,

To fall in love again,
To take a chance again,
To bare your heart again,
To cherish another's heart again,
People of the sea, who were stranded on the shore due to fear,
Set sail for home again.