I have to get serious now. I have to walk straight into fear, as I have done before, but this time it seems so much more real. For this time, I have made myself responsible for broken feelings and the soul of someone I care so much about that I fear running the same course that I’ve run before.

I fear losing myself.

This time I’m walking in with hardly any feeling at all, because the last time I let myself feel something it nearly killed me, so I’ve resigned myself to an emptiness, a cold dark world that no one can enter. A place where I reside alone, and interactions with others are just passing words. I feel at home here, I feel like I belong here, and I feel like in this place I can do anything, become anything I want and take on the entire world. I’d just have to do it alone. The truth in that is, I am content in this place.

So what happens when someone comes along and tells you they like you, they like the way you listen to them, and let them talk, and they like the way the sunshine reflects in my eyes and that they weren’t looking for me but now that they found me I’m all they can think about. What happens now?

Because I can’t feel anything. I know I could, if I let myself I know I could. I could feel love and reciprocate love, and I could probably be whatever they want me to be, but I’ve done that before. I know where I went wrong and what I shouldn’t have tolerated. But I am still at fault for letting myself get lost. So why would I ever want to feel anything again?

Because even when I let myself love, I still didn’t feel happiness, or joy, or excitement, I didn’t feel relief or comfort, I didn’t feel anything. Except for one thing. I felt sadness. My home.

Do I give in? Do I let myself love, because I know what it will do for someone else? I’ve always been okay with feeling hardly anything at all and I like it when the skies are gray and the rain falls and everyone wants to hide, but not me. I want to take on the world and run into the trenches and work until the sun comes up again. I love that sadness and pain.

The world says to let that go, to let yourself love and be loved, to never apologize for loving someone. To feel. But what if that isn’t what I want? How do you tell someone that they deserve the love they thought you were showing them, but that you can’t provide it? That what you’ve given them is just how they should be treated by any decent person, even though they’ve never been given that?

How do you live in darkness when a shattering ray of sun comes crashing through your window and says you don’t have to feel this way. How do you explain that you like that darkness, that it makes you feel safe, because its the same darkness everyone else wants to avoid, everyone fights so hard to be free from. And finally, how do I explain that I need that darkness, that without it I feel vulnerable and weak;

That I stand so close to the fire because the threat of the flames takes just enough oxygen to make me feel something.