Looking for Lei

I think about you the most when I am on this app. Probably because you remind me of feeling my heart ricochet out of my chest. Probably because you remind me of loving what does not love me. Probably because you are written in between the fabric of my existence. I think about you the most when I am writing. Because you are traced on the curves of my brain.

I had my weekly therapy session today and we discussed some stuff from my childhood that I realized isn't normal. It was somewhere between describing one specific incident that started a snowball of other stories to arise, pushing all these suppressed memories to the forefront of my mind. I cried silently, brushing away the tears quickly and moving forward with my story. My therapist noticed this and asked, "Why aren't you letting yourself feel these emotions? You're not allowing yourself to cry." I laughed, swiping at the continuous flow. "I don't know," I shrugged. "My dad never really liked crying."

I’m afraid of books sometimes. They reveal truths that I’ve never spoken aloud, they tell stories of people who are scarily too much like me. But then I feel comfort knowing I am not the only one who has thought these thoughts, fiction or not.

All I want this Christmas is for you to look at me like you did when we first met. Nothing else.

I've given all the space I can give. I'm boxed into a corner and the room just keeps filling, and I can't breathe in here, it's suffocating. So I punch a hole into the wall. Fresh air brushes against my cheek as it filters into the room. It goes quiet, everyone looking at me as if they'd forgotten I was there, forgotten that I'd invited them into this place, my space. I punch another hole, then another, then another, until a human-sized hole exists. And I slip out of it.

Please— I don’t want to play this game with you. Just let me go.

I thought avoiding getting close to people was a tired old cliche, a book trope, something uncharacteristic of me. Yet, here I am, pushing away people who try to get to know me. Not because I dislike them or because of any wrong they’ve done me, but simply because they are much too good, too kind, too worth it to get tangled in the web that is me.