Mid-range Maturity

Metaphors of the heart, the body, the soul. A thousand languages. A million forms.

Fools and fondness, truth and fate, cascading verses from authors across the unwavering expanse of time.

All far better suited to speak of love than I ever could be.

Love was a hypothetical. Something to mention only in questions, something only noted in observations of others.

Until it surrounded me, substantiating its existence, demanding I bear witness by experience. Proving itself as no longer a question, but an answer.

I was no longer an observer, as it wrapped itself around me, weaving through my veins.

It pulled the sunrise over the horizon and challenged me to look away. I doubt I'd been able, were I to try.

Love was a hypothetical until it was certainty. Until it gave me no option but to let it in. Until it burned blindingly bright, barely contained by my mortal frame.

And though every lovestruck soul from the beginnings of time has already penned their greatest dedications to love,

As an immature teenager, blood boiling with angst and longing;

As an adult, gone from my waking world but visiting me in my subconscious;

And even now, a decade later, both coalescing to that same endpoint.

A feeling I'd never get back, when you disappeared for good. You left behind your afterimage, suspended in time, a snapshot of all the excitement and possibilities you once were to me.

What surprise, then, as you reached through that veil, that my heart should race.

Why have you always teased the emotion from my fingertips? Pushed me to wistful reverie against my will? Drawn the prose and pen strokes from my hands?

Or worse, it feels like our last conversation was the dream and I'm waking up.

I didn't want this. But maybe now I do.

I always come running to anyone that's hurting. But I feel so alone when I'm hurting instead.

I try to toe the line of "don't be selfish, they have enough to deal with" and "please help me. I can't do this. I don't want to feel like this."

I'll wait it out, find a way forward, every day. But I just wish I knew what was wrong and how to fix it.

Instead, I'll keep digging and trying to FIND a problem. I've always done that. When there is in fact a problem, it works. I face something and deal with it. But other times, my brain exhausts itself trying to figure out a nonexistent "big issue". And amplifies the tiny normal ones.

Including what I've taken on from others.

I give so much of me away. I can't operate in any other capacity. But then I overdo it.

I'm exhausted.