3am thoughts: reciprocation

yearning for things i cannot reach

It seems to me that lies escape my mouth when I speak of my ignorance towards the need for love. There is enough of it in my heart that patiently waits to be poured into a worthy soil, to plant itself like a seed and be watered on the daily despite my own impatience. Ideas of a place so safe, a home in a person, a pair of hands to wipe tears often caught by cotton pillow cases, drying with time as the moon bids goodbye.

A soft yet heavy yearning weighs down like a warm stone in the crevice of a heart so laden with simmering fury, begging for a pair of eyes to look into these brown ones and truly see the child underneath, asking to be liberated.

To be liberated from the walls built brick by brick from the age of four, to hide from the ones who hurt me the most—the same ones we call our loved ones, our family, our protectors. The same ones who instill the insecurities in my head and the tiredness in my bones; nitpicking every step I take and every choice I make, tugging at old puppet strings to make me dance to their tune.

To be liberated from a heavy mind that bleeds into my actions, making my heart rot and attract fruit flies to the carnival of impatience and bursts of anger accompanied by sky-high ego that never wants to lose. The need to please others and yet show them no mercy; the need to earn validation and yet be repulsed by it simultaneously.

Is too much to ask for understanding and acceptance, to be held through a storm until the exhaustion in my marrow slowly dissipates and the weight is lifted off the graveyard in these shoulders?

Is it too high a fee to pay, to be seen?

Am I too difficult? Too much? Too emotional? How many seeds to I need to plant before the right one grows and gives me what I need? But it does not end there. If the plant grows, what makes me think I am worthy of being the hands that pluck its stem from the soil and hold it in the fragility of my vase, with lukewarm water fogged by tears and dimmed sunlight passing through decaying curtains?

I am Truman, unaware of the cameras and the actors and the perfectly curated set that I walk along every day—but I am the director, I am the extra, I am the cardboard buildings and the walls at the end of the ocean. I yell CUT! and the cameras keep rolling. I am too self-aware, and yet I am deceived.

It seems to me then that perhaps I do not receive the seeds I sow simply because I have not watered them enough. There is no light. There is only darkness disguising itself as a shadow in the daylight, pretending the walls are not there to cage a heart so deteriorated it no longer beats to breathe. Chbosky says we accept the love we think we deserve and maybe the love I beg for does not exist for it is not meant for me.

And I often wonder if the real worth is within the soil or within the seed. For who am I to yearn for everything, to receive, if I fail to guarantee my own reciprocation?