I feel the shield you carry.
It’s heavy like armor—impenetrable.
In many ways, we all wear armor. We wear it around our hearts to keep the hurt out.
The longer life breathes us in, the more bruises we collect and sometimes, they stick around. The faint black and blue—a reminder to hitch the shield up higher because you never know what will come of what.
People with the heaviest armor tend to have the most tender hearts.
To bear all that love to the world—it’s like getting too close to the sun. It will burn all of you up.
My own heart has been broken many times over the years, days, hours, seconds.
It breaks at the slightest hint of rejection. Or the last word before a novel ends.
It breaks when someone else breaks. Or when a tree falls to the Earth too soon.
It breaks when possibility shrinks.
And when a beautiful moment ceases to exist.
Heart break is unavoidable, yet much of what we do is designed to avoid it.
What if everything we do to avoid heart break, ends up breaking our hearts anyways?
It’s like delayed gratification… except backwards.
We think we’re protecting ourselves when really, we’re just fooling ourselves.
My experience is that there comes a point when carrying the shield gets too heavy.
There comes a point when you falter beneath the iron. When you grow tired of being comfortable with being alone.
In that moment, it’s like waking up to morning, only to realize that what you want to see most is the exact opposite of what you see.
It’s then that you break open.
And you realize that while you’ve kept out heart break, you’ve also kept out the very thing you crave.
All of those years of choosing the shield dissolve the moment you choose to step into the sun.
And your heart aches
simply from missing the warmth upon your skin.
With love,
-Kayla
Words & Wisdom
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