Coffee and Beards

You make me happier than anyone else ever has. Or maybe I've let you make me happier than anyone else ever has. Either way, I'm scared to death. Because allowing myself to feel the highest of highs only means I am susceptible to feeling the lowest of lows. I'm terrified because somehow you've infiltrated the steel fortress that I've spent my entire life building. Or maybe I was the one who let you in. Either way, I'm scared to death.

What is it about you that draws me to you? I wonder if you feel the same pull that I do, the one that makes me forget my fear of commitment and my disdain of attachment. It's like we're magnets, flipped to the correct side, pulled towards each other by some greater force. 

Your eyes open, slowly. Heavy, like this is the first time they have ever been lifted. You stumble out of the warm, safe haven you've created out of pillows and comforters to greet a world that is seemingly unfamiliar. Thoughts are coming to you jumbled and incoherent, like your brain hasn't fully awoken from its slumber. The world is dull, uninteresting, a monotonous stretch of black and white. Morning.

You let your head rest gently on the pillow as it welcomes you with open arms. Your eyes yearn to close; they are tired from a day of seeing things that lack the lustre that they crave. But this is when your mind seems to come alive. Your imagination begins to paint the darkness around you with beautiful colors and images and they dance around your room. They are intriguing and you yearn to dive deep into the abyss of your own thoughts - but they taunt you. 

Your body cries for rest. It longs for nothing more than to release all its worries into the night, but your mind dissents. This is when your hopes and fears, your truest feelings, come out to play. They cry, yell, and dance around you as if they have something to prove, yet nothing to lose. This is a war between body and mind. 

I'm afraid of depending on someone. I'm afraid of allowing myself to find comfort in someone other than myself. Because what happens if that person leaves? Or decides that they no longer want to be depended on? I will be left to try and find my way on my own, no one to help me, no one to guide me, no one to comfort me.

I'm afraid of allowing my feelings be affected by somebody else. Because other people aren't dependent; ultimately, they are looking out for themselves. Whereas, if I only find what I need in myself, I will never have to worry about being hurt or let down. I would never let myself down.

This is why people call me unemotional, heartless, cold (sometimes even mysterious). After countless minutes, hours, days, of self-reflection, I've come to realize a lot about myself. Like an oyster, I won't don't open up to people.

The more people know about you, the more they have to hurt you with. The more you allow someone to fill your life, the emptier you feel when they leave. And the more you lean on someone when you're down, the harder you fall when they walk out of your life. 

This is why I am bad at sharing information about myself. This is why I try not to allow others to play too big a part in affecting my emotions. This is why I have learned to only depend on myself when times get hard.

In reality, we are all just wonderfully undone.

We walk to and from like we have it all together, a smile on our faces like a bow atop a beautifully assembled gift. But underneath it all, are we not full of doubts, fears, joys, dreams, aspirations, love? Our bodies are vessels for the raw emotion we experience. 

To think that every single person not only has different thoughts, but different ways of thinking. We are all so wonderfully different yet we all pretend to be the same: normal, happy, sure of ourselves. What if we were to untie the string that we keep ourselves so neatly wrapped in? Would we completely unravel and become so messy that nobody could clean us up? Or would we become so marvellously free that we would never want to keep ourselves wrapped up again?

Sometimes, I feel like we work our whole lives just to feel a sense of "togetherness".

We go through all of primary school just admiring secondary school students thinking, "Wow, they really have it all figured out." And then when you finally get to secondary school you realize you really haven't figured anything out at all. Then you spend your time longing to be in post-secondary, because that's when you really have it all together. And then you get to post-secondary and guess what, you're really in no better position than when you were in secondary school. 

I mean, why do we go through the whole education system? Well, to get a good paying job of course and follow a career path that hopefully we enjoy. And why do we want that? So we can live a fulfilling life, obviously. But sometimes I think we get so caught up in trying to get to our goals, that we forget that the journey is just as, if not more, important. 

I would love to be able to move to a different city, any city, and be able to discover all the ins and outs unique to that place. I want to smell the difference in the air and experience a whole new culture. I want to feel the pulse of another city's heartbeat. 

The world is such a magnificent, grand, diverse place. It would be such a shame to stay in one place my whole life and not see all there is to see. I want my eyes to be opened to strange and unexplainable things. I want my heart to be opened to all the different yet beautiful people this world has to offer. I want my life to be colored by the cultures of those all over the globe. 

What do I think is beautiful? A transparent mind.

I want you to bare your soul to me. Tell me your deepest thoughts; the ones that you think to yourself when you lay in bed trying to fall asleep. The ones that you try to hide from others, but not from me.

Tell me what you dream about, what you live for, what you're passionate about. I want to know what makes you tick, what makes the fire burn behind your eyes. Because that's what you live to do, and I want to know why you live to do it.

I want to know the things that scare you. And I don't mean the things that you're startled by, or the things that frighten you. I'm talking about the things that your entire being shudders to think about. The things that would shatter you, break you, tear you to pieces.

I want you to share these things with me. Bare not your body, but bare your mind. That's what I find absolutely beautiful. A body is just that, a body. Without your passions, hopes, fears, dreams, it's an empty vessel. I know that your heart pumps blood through your veins, but what I want to know is what your heart pumps for.