Will everyone love me from a distance? I feel like they have only loved me from afar, when I am beautiful and without the imperfections that are so readily sighted when you really look me in the eyes. That's the problem: When you really look me in the eyes, I break down into tiny pieces, tiny bits of flawed matter that really adds up to nothing except a distant beauty. I do not blend as well as I should, like fine china with so many fissures running through it, fragile and delicate and bound to shatter. I feel my heart beating and you can read between the lines, the cracks that let you see beneath my armor, and you can see the fine lines that hold me together--the nerves that cause my thick limbs to quiver with such fear. Because of when you held my heart in your crooked hands, I place trust in the wrong places. I imagine to see love in the eyes of leeches, where there is nothing in reality. There is no love lost in my life because there was none to be had in the beginning. I love and that is all that means anything. I love God. I love my family. I love my friends. I love everything and everyone, but I am losing trust. I do not expect to lose faith, but my trust wavers as the branches of a willow sway sadly in the wind. I am different every day. I am changing. I am breaking off in pieces so that I may acquire the new, the growth of time passing over my body. I imagine the air against my skin. I imagine it flowing through me, into me, off of me... and I think of you, and I brush you off, because when I used to think of distrust, I brushed it off. I have learned more by the crooked hands of man than by any leap of faith. It's what happens when you fall and expect to be caught: It's a rude awakening. I imagine it's like being ripped from purgatory with the expectation of manna, only to have your empty lungs filled with ice so cold it burns it's way through your body. I have been changed and I will grow from it and I will not let myself be hurt so easily ever again. I have avoided hurting others, but I will not allow myself to be wounded so greatly for their sake.

This is the end of my devotion, which once was boundless. I will not hurt others but I will not protect them, because I cannot expect the same in return. Life is an ebb and flow of energies, but these lies have not been.

I AM NOT A RENEWABLE RESOURCE. Once I break, there's no repairing me.