You were colder than I ever was, even when my walls were up high and I held on to myself tightly, fearing that I would unwind beneath your gaze. You were robotic, made of steel and ice smoothed out so perfectly that I wondered whether the fire inside of you lay safe or stifled within its stone fortress.
We were an impossible combination, you and I. A man so afraid to love he had barricaded his soul against the emotions that threw themselves against the concrete walls of his heart. A woman who loved with reckless abandon, letting each visitor take, and take, and take, until every broken smile and every drop of her soul tasted like emptiness.
What were we doing then, falling into each other’s arms? Why did we pursue in each other’s lips the answers we never wanted to find?
Eventually, our barricaded hearts surrended. The very emotions we fled from arrived perfectly on cue: that is to say, unexpectedly. They encroached upon us and unwound us until, without our permission, our hearts had fallen in love.
Yet it would be wrong to say we were not still the same souls. Our hearts had rehearsed these emotions. I still contained myself, grasping for something to shelter me against your care. Between kisses I saw your eyes dart through the air, drawing invisible equations to quantify our love, to rationalize us, to explain it all away.
We became vulnerable to each other, and in that vulnerability we shattered. We fell apart, and when we did, we simply looked at each other and pretended that we were still whole, pretended our weary hearts hadn’t been left behind on the road, too tired to continue.
What happens now, my love?
Will we wander, searching for the fragments of ourselves we scattered across our past? Will we wander, gathering tears and lost hopes to weld each shard of our crystal hearts together again? Will we wander, leaving behind the fears that have been our only company, our only protection, in decades of warped artificiality?
Will I wander, knocking on the doors of your heart’s fortress?
Would you dare open the door?
Would I dare go inside?
Would you lead me to safety?
Would I bring to you warmth?
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