blinding the eyes

Love is like a sharp blast of light, bearable only to the brave and kind of heart.

It feels so much like when you are under a blanket as a kid and you lift up the teeniest of corners and light floods in for a brief moment before you let the blanket fall. Lift a corner for a second and be blinked by beams of light too strong for eyes grown accustomed to the darkness. It feels like that. Like a glimpse of a beautiful future bathed in trust and admiration. But painful to the eyes. The first love, glimpse, is always hardest. But as relationships wane and wax the eyes grow elastic. Easily overcoming the changing of the light. The first love is innocent, and beautiful, but shallow. Only when you are aware of the possibility of pain, of disregard, of rejection—that you can walk into the arms of love with bravery. For bravery is not brave without an idea of the consequences. Love is unyielding to the darkness challenging it. It is forceful but not a bully. It is honest with itself in the face of pain. Nothing worth the price of love will be forgotten or cast aside. For love is the crown jewel, the lost pearl of existence. And when it is found by the brave they pursue the light. As life turns i feel the strangest desire to hold on to it. As a child I was willing to listen and obey those who seemed to know more than me. As an adolescent I fought the constrains of my own mind. I became crazy for a time. Always afraid to speak my mind, search my soul, and find the honest self within. Holding on to life is not easy because it keeps trying to break free of the grasp. Hold tight then, be brave. No one choses the life they get. The raffle wheel spins and stops and lets you off wherever it choses. A nice home, a sad home, a challenging home, no home. Factors outside your control chose where you end up and then leave you with the pieces and choices of your own. Bingo! You get to live here—have fun with the results, I hope you make it. Life doesn’t even come with an instruction book. No directions to tell you to hold on to the friend who is there for you most of the time. Instead you remember the some of the time they forget what you like, who you like, what you hate. And you let them go. Life teaches you along the way but one wishes that it had taught you before you had so many choices to mess up. Life is wasted trying to find oneself in youth. The best years of your life are spent running around aimlessly testing the chemicals and finding patterns in the reactions. One mol of this under so much heat blows up in the face. It would make much more sense if life was backwards. If you were born when you are old and know everything and spent getting younger. Retirement would be in the adolescent years and when one has the most energy and life to spend. No one tells you these things when you're young. But maybe they tried once, and realized children don’t listen—people have to experience things to learn for themselves. Then why, O Parents, do you shelter your children? You are only postponing their knowledge. Experience is a deadly vice, without it life is really not lived, but with it comes pain and mistakes and dreadful consequences. For if one spends her entire life listening to the instructions of another, she never really lives for herself. It is more brave to step out onto the waters and make a few mistakes than to listen to the captain and stay in the boat. The taste of the sea, the salt on the face, and yes, the feeling of drowning. That is life. The boat is comfortable, maybe you will encounter some slivers. But the captain is there to take them out. “But sharks live in the water! One must act rationally.” I will tell you—a life lived rationally is no life at all. Mistakes are evidence of bravery, and poor judgment too, but no one is born with stellar judgment. No one has all the answers. The only judgment is when someone has a lot of experiences and fails to learn from them. But also everyone learns at their own pace. So I have just removed all possibility of judgment, haven’t I.