A Letter To The Boy Who Couldn’t Love Me

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People like you write critiques before they read the whole story, and I would urge you to flip through these pages, but my eyes tell a story in a language that you cannot understand.

I think the hardest part about that is that I wish you did understand — but people like you take no interest in learning a new language. People like you cannot love people like me because people like me read books start to finish once, then again, and then again. I read between the lines too in an attempt to understand the writer.

In this way, you could have understood me. You always say I make something out of nothing, but that’s only because I don’t believe in the concept of nothing. Even silence is saying something. Even the space between your fingers is not “nothing.” It is full of tiny particles.

That’s why I read between the lines. There might not be words there, but there is always a meaning. Some things are just a little bit more difficult to hear. Some things require a change of perspective to see.

Who decided that only what begs to be heard is worth listening to, or that only what begs to be seen is worth noticing?

By immersing myself in a story, I immerse myself in the soul of whoever it is that wrote it. This is how I have come to know the language of everyone I’ve ever loved. I would have learned yours too.

You keep telling me to wear my heart on my sleeve, but my heart is in these words. It’s in the 147 pages of the journal that I bring everywhere with me. It’s in the poetry that you never bother to read. My heart is in the songs I listen to on full blast driving down the highway, and in the songs I skip because I can’t bear the memories that flood through my mind like a dam has just collapsed every time I hear them.

You always asked if you could change the song. You always got frustrated when I skipped the “good ones.”

It’s in the 27 free book samples that I have downloaded because I can’t afford to buy the full ones right now. My heart is in the coffee shops I visit and in the pictures I take of everything I hope to never lose.

You say I take too many pictures of you, did you ever think that maybe I just didn’t want to lose you?

People like you are afraid of changing their minds, so they never do. People like me live for changing my mind. After all, what is the point if we just remain the same people, stuck in the same place, doing the same things?

Don’t you ever get bored, never questioning if there’s more to life than the same stagnant ideas in your head?

People like you skip through the scary parts of movies, and the boring parts too, and then they wonder why the story didn’t make sense to them. I’m not sorry that my sneak peeks are not enough for you. They aren’t meant to be. If you’re going to love me, you can’t just love some of me. You have to love all of me.

You’re afraid, and I am too, but people like you let fear stop them from reading stories and watching movies. People like me can’t stop reading stories and watching movies.

That’s the thing about fear. It can intimidate you or excite you. It can discourage you or inspire you. It can hold you back, or set you free.

I don’t know if you’re afraid of hearing something that challenges you, of experiencing something that changes you, of seeing something that doesn’t make sense, or of wasting your time, but I’m telling you that nothing has the ability to make life dull like fear does. I’m telling you that nothing has the ability to make life magical like fear does.

If you weren’t so quick to judge, so quick to run away from anything that is different from what you’re used to, you might have seen that hearts are not only worn on sleeves. Sometimes they’re worn on so much more than that.

My heart was right there with you all along, all you had to do was see it. But I guess people like you can not love people like me.