waldeinsamkeit.

My covers are shoved unceremoniously onto the floor, my limbs splayed haphazardly, and the thick curls of my dark hair sticking to the nape of my neck.  My heart won’t stop beating, and I can’t help my incessant exasperated sighs.

I’m too exhausted to get up and turn off the blasting heat (turned on by the nimble fingers of my ‘must be undeniably mad’ flat-mate) but I know that I will have to do it eventually before my skin becomes only tender sweat seasoned flesh encasing my slow-broiled organs.

If my tale was a book, and every life experience was to be labeled with a chapter title, I suppose this particular time of my life would be called: “Conscience”, or maybe “Finding truths”. That is if a poet or someone who has a tendency to lean toward the love of prose is penning my tale. However, a more than likelier title would be: “So tired of hiding the truths from the people I love, and purposefully isolating myself in fear of judgment, that I could just spit.”

But that would be too long of a heading to make a very good title.

I never wished to tell anyone the truth, not a friend, nor a relation, or a supposed love. If I fabricated my life, bending the truth to create a persona of an individual that is entirely its own -- unique, yet undeniable in character -- then how could I possibly become attached? I would smile inside and chuckle to myself. What a good jest. No one knew me. Not really. And that alone made me untouchable. For those men with long metal fingers could thrust their cold hands down my throat to extract what they believed to be my essence, my soul, the clock that made me tick. But the joke was on them. Because they had nothing to hold over my head to hurt me, because what I allowed for them to know was controlled and calculated.

Why can I not love them? Because they do not love the real me, therefore, they cannot love me at all. And it is easier to not love someone who does not love you, than not love someone who does.

I remember when I was barely twelve, sitting in an uncomfortable wooden box desk in the portable classroom just outside the main building of my middle school. I recall my eyes following the veins of the crude sketch on the white board of a human heart, only half listening to her as I imagined the different colors I would have used if she had asked me to draw it instead.

While rustling through my bag to find my plastic box of colored pencils to map out the idea on my homework, she said something that caught my attention.

The human heart is approximately the size of a fist.

I remember stopping my hands from their quest to examine them; curling my short fingers tightly into my small palm.

I remember thinking that this was indeed an impossibility; that the way I could feel so ardently and love so passionately must be larger than my frail hands, something more powerful than my twelve year old fist.

When I rode home on the bus that day, instead of staring out the window per my normal routine, I stared intensely down at my hands. When I got home I ran into the bathroom, tore off my shirt and climbed up onto the vanity to look at my reflection in the mirror. I held my fist over the place I imagined my heart to be. I could feel it beat beneath my fingernails. It was then that I noticed the split and broken skin on my pinky finger, and upon closer inspection of my hands I found scars, callouses, and thick veins protected only by a thin, near-translucent layer for protection.

I was afraid. I knew with my fervent and desperate love, I would not last long in ‘the real world’. I would soon take a bad fall and shatter to pieces, never to recover.

So now, older, through an impenetrable shadow I often sit in a grimy corner. No one put me in that corner, but I chose it for myself long ago.

 “I lie, you know” I warn them, a smile tugging at my lips. I never tell my own origin story, and if I do – not accurately – and never the same way twice. Rumors are started by people who watch what I leave behind, perpetuated by those who wont know the truth or find closure; and spread by those who didn’t know more than what they were told. What is truth? Never trust the truth. A lie is simply a lie, but truth is subjective.

“Stay away from this corner,” a sign cautions, “its awfully cold there.” But men read it and laugh arrogantly, saying that they will wear a sweater.

Then after their visit, they leave shaken, and their friends will look at them, shaking their heads with pity, and say that they look so cold now.

I lie because I am so convinced of my own destruction, that I’ve never taken the risk of being destroyed.

This personality characteristic I was always so certain of. Until a few evenings ago. I found myself caught up in a conversation with a soul that I didn’t know very well, when this individual asked me a personal question. I had answered it a million times before, a thousand different ways. But as I confidently started to speak, I gagged, choked on and then swallowed my pre-conceived story. I found that suddenly, I had no desire to act, or to pretend. I simply no longer cared.

Something happed a few days ago when I was on my knees, talking with my best friend.

I believe that he changed my heart.

A character flaw that has plagued me since childhood – an anxious desire to keep my secrets hidden in a locked box, and an avid need to escape the judgment of others – disappeared so suddenly and drastically overnight.

And for the first time in my life, I am discovering myself through truths, however subjective. And although I may not be the desperately mysterious,  tragically poetic and heartbreakingly misunderstood dark beauty that I have always wanted to be, I’m learning that I’m actually okay with simply being me.

I still have so much to learn, and so far to go, but I feel like I have not just taken a single step forward on the path of self-actualization, but perhaps I flew a few miles instead.  

~C