You have had a hard life.
You have been hurt so often. Maybe deserved, maybe undeserved, but it really doesn’t matter.
Shattered and broken, love became a sharp shard; beautiful, but blissfully bruising. Slashes and cuts mark your past attempts at holding love close.
Of daring to let someone in.
Failures at love have left scar tissue around the innermost parts of you. Scars long past, but scars that still ache when it rains.
You are tired…of hurting; of being misled; of being deceived; of being neglected. You are just tired.
At least you were.
Then one day, after a night of holding yourself, you got sick of it. You were no longer going to feel sorry for yourself. You were going to be the best you and leave love to the hopeless romantics. After all, romance is but a costly dream, and love is too hard to be considered practical.
You began working on your armor. Invisible, impenetrable…an airspace a micro-inch long, but 50 heartbreaks thick.
You were going to work on you; only care about you; only be about you. You’ve deposited so much into others. You’ve lost yourself. This is a purge of the most righteous order. This is you avenging yourself, for yourself, by yourself. Your armor became your strength while “the you” inside healed.
And it was great! This armor allowed you to exercise apathy at will. If anything even felt like it was going to hurt you, the armor took care of it. It almost seemed sentient at times, warning you before you even recognized the threat. The relationship between you and your armor progressed so well, that you stopped even checking if the threats were real. Too much thinking and feeling. You trusted your armor to do the heavy lifting so you could focus on you.
But then, you begin noticing things. Friends stopped calling as much. People seemed to avoid you. When you would seek out the reason why you weren’t invited to the latest event, they seemed shocked that you even wanted to be. This too hurt. This too pricked. Your armor activated instantly.
“You don’t need them.” A voice of your own design from a functioning tomb of your own making.
“But, I want to go out sometime.”
“So you can be hurt again? Rejected again? All this hard work we…“
“We?”
“…you did. You’re going to put yourself back in that place again?”
The armor that was meant to buffer you against hurt is now trying to protect you against your biggest threat—you.
You are now a hostage of your own making. No guns or ransom demands needed.
All that is needed to keep you in place is fear.
Your conversations are awkward now. Your armor only lets things go so far before your own self-defense mechanisms remind you of the reasons why the armor was created in the first place. Fear was the motivation of the armor you constructed. The problem is, you didn’t realize pain is a part of the process of growth. You didn’t realize that disconnecting yourself comes with a cost. The armor only has room for one.
But hey…
At least you’re safe.
