The truth between the lines

  How is it possible to know so much yet so little? Each day I see things, hear things, learn things. Each day I become more of an adult, but becoming older only leaves me more confused.

  Who am I? Who are you?

  Why do some things happen to some people and other things to others? Why is it that you can go about your life knowing something is wrong but never having the courage to fix it? Why is it that you walk into an empty room and feel your own presence, like a wave of sadness wash over you the moment you disappear from the prying eyes of society. Why is it that in the silence of one's life, a human heart can hold so much pain.

  Because I know so much and I want so much, but this world is austere. All my dreams, like stars, once so bright, now left as nothing, burned up by the flame of expectations. Do this to be loved. Calculate your every movement to be liked. Guard your tongue from your emotions to be what everyone wants you to be. A rope of thorn briar, wrapping slowly around your heart, keeping you from who you truly are.

  We are all born unique, but die as photocopies. There's a sort of beauty in being unique, like art. Art is breathtaking not because it is appealing to the eye but because it makes you think and that is why people love art. But nothing quite makes someone love you if you are not noticed by the relentlessly hungry human eye. And the only way to be noticed is if you match the stereotypical definition of beauty.

  If you are pretty then what more could you want? Everything is at your disposal. When you are a kid you wish upon the stars to look just like the pretty Disney princesses. They are beautiful therefore loved by all. And if you are loved then you have everything your heart could ever desire.

  But maturing is realizing that beauty causes more pain than good. Because once you hear you are beautiful, a seed of desire is planted in your heart. The seed craves to hear more, stretching its roots to every corner of everything that you once were. A blight killing everything, including yourself, for that desire to be accepted. Then once you become beautiful, that beauty is always escaping, never perpetual. There will always be someone prettier, happier. Someone who will replace you when you thought you were irreplaceable.

  The moment you realize this, that your looks will never be enough to make someone love you, then what are you left as but nothing?

  It's one thing to be beautiful physically, and another thing to be a beautiful human, and perhaps that's what is difficult for others to understand. If you can’t demonstrate love or kindness or emotional sympathy because you are broken on the inside, then what does your outward appearance matter? 

  They will only ever crave to touch you, but never want you. 

  Like glass. Apply heat, then it can be molded to whatever your heart desires. Something that appears so indestructible, and yet pristine. Glass is beautiful when complete. To the eye, it's perfect. But when the glass breaks because of all the pressure, no one wants it.

 It's still beautiful but hurts to touch. You try to pick it up with your hands, only to see blood running. You would rather leave the pretty glass than fix it and call it your own. It's not easy loving something that's broken.

  But perhaps this sense of insufficiency wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for love. Why do we want love? And with that question, what even is it?

  Humans are a social species, we cannot live without the attention from others. The moment we get one taste, it becomes an insatiable desire. 

  For some, I have realized, love is an antidote to loneliness. Love can also bring happiness in a void of emptiness. For others, it serves as a means to feel safe. A thousand definitions but the same outcome. A false sense of euphoria that never quite seems to last. All you know is that you want more. More. More. More.

  But what if you only receive this addicting attention because others simply want to call you their own? Something to touch, to admire, to keep in a bottle in the back of their mind. And what if this feeling only brings you pain. You become so tired of searching, of striving to be enough for someone, that you lose yourself in a sea of disappointment.

  You understand you were hurt so you end this love. But then one smile, one laugh, one kind act and you find yourself running back to the very thing you swore to run away from. An endless cycle of hurt. If you're the other person, do you realize what you are doing to me? Do you realize the tears and the hurt in the pit of my stomach when you make me chase after you?

  If you don’t, then maybe you should. And if you do, then what sort of monster are you? Because I understand why you feel the need for my naive attention. In the end, the real monster is me, for being too weak.

  But would you still call that love? I certainly don’t. 

  That love doesn’t understand the dark beauty that comes from pain.

  And perhaps it's only in the quiet places where I have begun to realize this. When I close myself away from the world, in the distant place where I allow my mind to roam and my fingers to write. It is when I allow myself the chance to unwrap the thorn briars and piece together the remains of my glass heart, that I cry.

  Tears become weights on your feet and pull you down below the surface of the tormenting ocean we call life and into reality. It's the type of cry that makes you understand.

  And then I know. 

  Perhaps you already know what I have just begun to realize, and have known it for a while, but lack the courage to give it a name. Maybe you have ignored it in the way I once was ignorant to the face of truth. Ignore and ignorance, after all, are not the same thing. Freedom to and freedom from. But in the end, the truth will find you and sink its bitter-sweet teeth into you. 

 I have only just begun to see this. 

 Better late than never, after all.

So that’s why I tell you this, amid all the questions I still have no answers for. A lesson that took me a lifetime of pain to understand. 

 Everyone craves something that no one can ever be. And maybe that's what we all are searching for. Somehow, and some way to be enough. Because I know what I am. 

  I am not enough.