Change of Pace

I haven’t published anything on here in awhile because I’ve always been a big proponent of writing about what hurts. I guess I was sifting through the hurt for too long and forgot how to write about what doesn’t.

For years I’ve been told I’m “too intense.” I feel too much, too fast. I’ve also been called distant. I try to be more for them but I fall short and end up feeling nothing at all. I either pour myself into someone until I’m empty or I pull back and give them a version of me that I think they’d prefer me to be. It’s hard to imagine that part of who I was – the girl who knew how to pretend.

I am afraid of animals that are unusually large. I have dreams about a burning house and even though I know the house is empty and it’s close to collapsing, I keep running back inside. I lied on my resume about understanding Search Engine Optimization and I haven’t made any attempts at changing that. My thoughts are frantic and chaotic but I procrastinate anyways. With a hot passion, I hate vinegary foods and sour beer and the way my hair looks nearly every single day. I used to pretend to care about sports and played it cool to the point of complacency. These are a handful of things that came to mind when I thought about the pieces I hide. Being myself has never been the issue, but many months ago a switch flipped and I stopped lying about who I want to be.

I think of him and the way falling in love with him feels a lot like falling in love with me, too. The waves of emotion that crash into me every time I look at him are refreshing and finally love feels more like swimming instead of drowning. He always looks like he’s thinking. On the nights we lay awake in silence, I just want to know what is happening in his brain, holding him on this side of consciousness.

It’s things like this that show me how different my heart is because of him. What used to control me has now been taken over by thoughts as simple as the way he sounds when he sighs. Each time his smile grows across his face, I feel an overwhelming urge to watch his hair go gray and his skin wrinkle over the course of the rest of my existence.