I think one of the most difficult skills for a human being to master is empathy. It’s ironic, being able to empathize may be the only unique characteristic that separates human animals from all other animals. But you know, it’s hard for us because we want what we want. We are what we are, and at the end of the day I live inside my head and you live inside your head. We have limits.
We met at a coffee shop right down the street from your apartment. I didn’t know this coffee joint was so conveniently located for you, but alas, I am not sure it would have made much of a difference if I had. I am 26 years young, with lined eyes, ringlet curls, and intentions to keep up the walls that I’ve constructed in my mind, made out of self-protecting boundaries. But can you blame me? We all self-protect, and what better time to do this is there than when meeting a stranger at a coffee shop.
The problem is, no matter how many walls I construct at certain times they are not enough to weather the storm of a bleeding heart. I put band aids on, but it doesn’t stop it. I admit a part of me loves the feeling of that rich, honest red dripping down and spilling out. I am learning to make my walls hardier so I can carry both the strength and the courage to embrace the challenge that comes with having a bloody heart covered in band aids.
Back to us.
You see me. I am a young woman, with soft olive skin. I am small, my hands could be swallowed in yours, and my head reaches just below your shoulders. My eyes are almond shaped: a combination of bright white defined by ridges of dark brown encompassing dilated pupils. You look at me like a hourglass, my curves spiral in and out from my hips, then retreat down my wide thighs to my feet that meet each other at a point on the earth. I am your hourglass; you wonder if you could flip me over and measure the time it would take until you cannot just see the nature of my curves, but feel them with your bare fingertips. I know this, I love this, and I hate this. I work with it in the way I move and in the creases of my smile as I gravitate towards you. It’s nice to meet your acquaintance.
At the same time you see me, I see you. And maybe, no surely, in many ways I am just as much to blame. I can’t help but love that you are taller than me and could caress me in your arms in a way that I would lose myself in you. I can feel in my nerves just as much as I look with my eyes at the veins in your arms winding underneath your skin. And if I am an hourglass in which sand is flowing from top to bottom, then you are a street sign. You are an upside down triangle with a large metal pole welding you to the earth. You are strong and bold and if I needed to I could hide behind you. I already want to depend on you.
Our laughter fills the coffee shop.
But here’s the thing. While our separate worlds are real, we are both wrong. I may be young, but I am not naïve. In my mind I know I cannot depend on you, you are a moving target. You will leave at sundown, when the last grain of sand falls to the bottom of my hourglass and you see no more use for me but adventures to be had elsewhere. And you are wrong (but I don’t know if you know this), because I may look like an hourglass but I am not. I am a bleeding heart, and every time you touch my bare skin electric currents jolt me and my body absorbs the shock. When you electrocute me, then you leave, you know I will be left in a pain deeper than I can control. This pain will entangle around my mind and my soul, becoming a small piece of my identity even after it fades away. I can go about my day and pretend like it’s not there, but pretending doesn’t make things disappear. The pain will energetically spew underneath the surface of skin until I am nothing but a shell curled up underneath bedsheets.
So I’m sorry. This cannot happen.
It turns out, you are not a street sign and I am not an hour glass. We are both simply two human beings that don’t fully understand each other’s needs and desires. It turns out we are much more complicated than what we see in the coffee shop just down the street from your apartment.
thesearchwithinme 