The Lover, Who is also the Wounded

Prompt Week 1, Day 2 — “Do you willingly take risks, knowing you might fail regarding matters of love.”

My multi-generational household was gearing up for a big move this past month. While rummaging through my mother’s closet I discovered my old diaries from girlhood. I sat down in the middle of the closet on a crafted wooden chair, with red chipped paint covered in it. It was dated like the diary I opened. There I found on multiple pages, my teenage heart expressed in bubbled letters and glittery ink gel. There were huge hearts and a familiar boy’s name carefully added in the middle of it. I remembered how many days I sat immersed in daydreams concerning him.

My innocent or not-so-innocent crush got out one day, and I read about how embarrassed I was. In that pretty glittery gel, my dreams crumbled into jagged pieces as I wrote about how I tried to impress him by how far I could throw a football. None of what I did worked of course. It may be small, but it was the beginning of a bad habit rooted in not being accepted. I would grow into an adult who would perform as if the goal was an Academy Award. I would rehearse my lines as if I were trying to secure a contract on the number one ABC drama. I would get peanuts back in my relationships, and I won no awards, and no titles. I would retire after a failed relationship drained and depleted.

My desperation to love and be loved made me stand out with the brightest of colors, and it made the predators in the wild sniff me out and devour me. They would take my flesh, and extract the energy they needed to become strong and discard of me in small, lethal doses. I would climb off of the rollercoaster of passionate emotions nearly withered and devoid of life each time. After awhile, I still wanted to love. I still had so much of it to give, but now I was different. I flinched at the thought of the sacrifices, the vulnerability, the arguments, the uneasiness, the limbo phases, and even the good times. These days, I back into the comfort of a shadow, winning the award for being elusive, and enigmatic.

So to answer your question, “No, absolutely not. I used to, but the wounds have turned into scars, and the scars turned into keloids.”