Brave Love
The business of heartaches has been brought up a lot recently, around the tables I sit at.
While heartache teaches you a few valuable things, in the most painful way possible, it also leaves you with a big, bold scar. The kind of scar that you don't even bother trying to hide. People can see it from miles away. People have a different look about them once they've had their heart genuinely, broken.
It's a pain you move on from, but does it ever really heal? You move on from the person that caused that aching, but do you ever really move on from the hurt that your fragile human soul felt? I'm not so sure.
If you've ever talked to someone about their first heartbreak, you can see it in their eyes. It can be years later and it's not that they're stuck on that person, it's that; just the memory of that kind of pain almost brings it back to life again. It's the pain of a small piece of yourself wilting away. A little piece of the love you offered to the world just dropping to the cold ground, petal by petal. You're dying for that one person to come water that piece of you and bring it back to life, but they just watch you beg for hydration. Then, that part of you dries up and is gone forever, as if it never existed in the first place.
It's sad. And you're never the same again. You grow and mature from it, but you're a little jaded and a little skeptical and a little scared.
I often think of the girl, before I was scared. Before I knew how badly a little heart could break.
Do you ever think about all those un-broken hearts out there? It's so beautiful.
Those hearts are like new frying pans. Clean and crisp. Nothing has ever been burned on them.
Like the piece of hair you always miss when using a curling iron. It goes without heat and stays exactly where it wants to be.
Like an Evergreen, that never loses its leaves.
Like new Chucks, still in the box.
Like a book you've been eager to read, but haven't turned a page.
Like a love letter you can read over and over again because it's so eloquently written.
All these things are beautiful, clean, unwounded, unscarred, but are they fulfilled?
I'd like to think the frying pan wants to smell fresh scrambled eggs in the morning, that it helped create, that piece of hair wants to get curled every now and then and pushed out of it's comfort zone, that Evergreen would like to feel the wind with a bare branch, without the interruption from it's leaves, those Chucks would like to stomp through the mud, dance in the moonlight, and get a little dirty living, that book would love to feel a hand turn it's pages and see the emotion it generates, and that love letter would like to be put down. It would like you to know that love isn't always eloquent, but it's messy and there will be things scratched out, misspelled, and parts you can't even understand until you read it over and over and over again.
Yes, I often think of the girl that was unwounded; unscathed by harsh words and lack of tenderness and then I think of the girl after. The girl with walls and an ever lingering doubt saying, "Will I feel that again? Will that pain haunt me again?"
I much prefer the girl after.
The brave girl.
Yes, after heartbreak, comes bravery.
You know the risks, you know the pain that might await, and yet, you decide to love again.
The love after you've had your heart ripped out is brave love.
It's the most powerful love out there.
The world can change with brave, love. Don't be scared. Love again.