What do you do when you are in love, but you are too afraid to give it?
What do you do when you are freaked out of your mind and
you are to afraid to receive love?
Is it because you don't feel deserving enough?
Is it because of the lingering pain from broken hearts gone by?
Are you hopeless?
I stood by you in the veiled jasmine, wishing for a hand to hold that never came.
You looked at me with longing, yet longing did not spur you,
did not inspire great orchestrations of ardor or desire.
One ray of sun cast shadows on our faces which painted our hearts sinful crimson
and our hearts danced in that moment.
But all moments come and go alike, like fleeting breaths of wind or wisps of wave on the shore.
We stand as the ivy twines between us, and I remember less and less
of the man I call my heart's request.
When do we stop loving? When do I start calling you the one who got away?
Is it giving up when I look at you, sitting on the fence between the man who
owns hope and earnest pursuit and the sad woman with a straw hat in her
roses, dead from the bitter winters, pulling weeds and bleeding from the thorns,
who claims the lost love, the flower fallen from its hip, haven given all it can and recedes
when the fruit of the bloom shrivels and whispers away. I do not want to go to her realm,
full of sadness and disappointment, yet the more I wait,
the less patience I have for the eager man whistling tunes and expecting sunshine
when the gray clouds threaten to burst.
Someday, you will have to tell her - whether she be me or a girl who stood next to you in a bar -
that you love her, that you need her, and if you allow this fear, this flinching reaction
to rule your heart, you will end up
lamenting a lost love, the heart broken that was never promised,
and that day will be infinitely more immense a burden on your heart
than all the pain you sought to avoid in the first place.
And then, truly, you will see that life is built around endurance and not evasion,
and you will wish you had endured the life which would have
been well worth the trepidation
for all that human frailty.
