Distance (didn't want it left on gaia)
From beginning to end, love in his life was measured by distance.
A child, not even in kindergarten yet, does not yet realize the meaning of love. To them love is a word you hear from family, from your mom and dad. Love is a word that falls easily from the lips of those around you. For someone that young, love is blind affection, adoration and delight. For someone that young, love is the distance you have to crawl or walk across the floor to reach the open arms of your parents.
Dreams rarely last long.
Five years old, barely old enough to know their place within the world this child is thrust into education, school grounds full of strangers. Being young though and resilient, children make friends easily and they learn to love those other children like siblings, pulling them close and making relationships that we know only now will never last. Love for them is how far you can roll or throw the ball, it's measured in the length of bodies strung by hands held tight as you play Red Rover, by jump ropes you skip together and licorice strings you split in half to share.
With friends come foes. People who hurt you, people who used you, defiled you so that you areforced to question love for the first time in your life. Thus, love is also the distance you have to run to those who will protect you and knowing how far they will go to make things right again.
By the age of 10 children aren't friends with everyone anymore. Groups are formed, and sometimes, you're just not allowed to be part of one. Nobody wants you anymore and you're alone. Friends? Those are what other people have, you have nothing. To console yourself you turn to pets, books, games you can play by yourself and you learn that you can love activities like you can people. In fact, this child learned that you could trust these inanimate things, these animals even more than you could other people and b ecause you can trust them to always be what they seem, you would never be given cause not to love them or they you. Love is measured in the length of time you spend alone, in the distance that separates you from everyone else.
By the time the kid is 14/15, they'll have learned enough about everyone around them, the couples on t.v., the people in books to know that love is a fairytale. There is no truth to the blind affections you learned as a child and no friendship ever lasts. The love of a parent is no longer unconditional and you fear the price you pay for it. All you learned about love previously takes on a new hue and rose tinted glasses turn grey. Love is the distance between dreams and reality, life and fantasy.
16 and a half, only a short while after the woes of the world turn your singing heart into a black pit of despair, someone manages to creep their way back in. Slowly but surely friends worm their way in, and then when it's least expected, you fall in love. All that time spent questioning and then someone turns around and makes you believe once more, against your better judgement. Love becomes the hairs breadth between two bodies, the distance you would travel to see them, the space of time between panting breaths.
Here you also find you do not need to meet face to face to love. There are people you may never meet who earn your affections, who make you wish that half a world was not so far away. And yet those same miles you wish to dissipate are what keep you together, for you've known too many pains from those you let too close. But sometimes you think, it hurts even more to keep yourself apart. Love is the distance that keeps you together.
17 and a half was a dismal year, betrayed by your family and torn brutally from the safety of a lover's arms. The perfect little world ripped to pieces as romantic love was forbidden and familial love abolished. As if the wounded chasm within your breast were not enough, the distance on land to the other piece of your heart increases as - kicking and screaming - you are forced from your home to a new box, a different prison.
And so you learn that in order to be allowed to love, you must always keep your distance. Otherwise those who crave power over you shall destroy the threat presented by happiness, self-confidance, support, trust, loyalty. All the things that comprise love and have the potential to save your guilt-wracked soul.
The ones you love are the ones you distance yourself from the most because you're afraid of what they'll do if they find out what you truly are. You love them, but they cannot love you because they cannot know you.. They would leave, you think, if they ever knew. They would hate you forever, and because you love them, that would destroy you. So you keep your distance. Love is the duration of your silence, a quiet filled with the screaming truths you keep locked behind your lips.
A child, not even in kindergarten yet, does not yet realize the meaning of love. To them love is a word you hear from family, from your mom and dad. Love is a word that falls easily from the lips of those around you. For someone that young, love is blind affection, adoration and delight. For someone that young, love is the distance you have to crawl or walk across the floor to reach the open arms of your parents.
Dreams rarely last long.
Five years old, barely old enough to know their place within the world this child is thrust into education, school grounds full of strangers. Being young though and resilient, children make friends easily and they learn to love those other children like siblings, pulling them close and making relationships that we know only now will never last. Love for them is how far you can roll or throw the ball, it's measured in the length of bodies strung by hands held tight as you play Red Rover, by jump ropes you skip together and licorice strings you split in half to share.
With friends come foes. People who hurt you, people who used you, defiled you so that you areforced to question love for the first time in your life. Thus, love is also the distance you have to run to those who will protect you and knowing how far they will go to make things right again.
By the age of 10 children aren't friends with everyone anymore. Groups are formed, and sometimes, you're just not allowed to be part of one. Nobody wants you anymore and you're alone. Friends? Those are what other people have, you have nothing. To console yourself you turn to pets, books, games you can play by yourself and you learn that you can love activities like you can people. In fact, this child learned that you could trust these inanimate things, these animals even more than you could other people and b ecause you can trust them to always be what they seem, you would never be given cause not to love them or they you. Love is measured in the length of time you spend alone, in the distance that separates you from everyone else.
By the time the kid is 14/15, they'll have learned enough about everyone around them, the couples on t.v., the people in books to know that love is a fairytale. There is no truth to the blind affections you learned as a child and no friendship ever lasts. The love of a parent is no longer unconditional and you fear the price you pay for it. All you learned about love previously takes on a new hue and rose tinted glasses turn grey. Love is the distance between dreams and reality, life and fantasy.
16 and a half, only a short while after the woes of the world turn your singing heart into a black pit of despair, someone manages to creep their way back in. Slowly but surely friends worm their way in, and then when it's least expected, you fall in love. All that time spent questioning and then someone turns around and makes you believe once more, against your better judgement. Love becomes the hairs breadth between two bodies, the distance you would travel to see them, the space of time between panting breaths.
Here you also find you do not need to meet face to face to love. There are people you may never meet who earn your affections, who make you wish that half a world was not so far away. And yet those same miles you wish to dissipate are what keep you together, for you've known too many pains from those you let too close. But sometimes you think, it hurts even more to keep yourself apart. Love is the distance that keeps you together.
17 and a half was a dismal year, betrayed by your family and torn brutally from the safety of a lover's arms. The perfect little world ripped to pieces as romantic love was forbidden and familial love abolished. As if the wounded chasm within your breast were not enough, the distance on land to the other piece of your heart increases as - kicking and screaming - you are forced from your home to a new box, a different prison.
And so you learn that in order to be allowed to love, you must always keep your distance. Otherwise those who crave power over you shall destroy the threat presented by happiness, self-confidance, support, trust, loyalty. All the things that comprise love and have the potential to save your guilt-wracked soul.
The ones you love are the ones you distance yourself from the most because you're afraid of what they'll do if they find out what you truly are. You love them, but they cannot love you because they cannot know you.. They would leave, you think, if they ever knew. They would hate you forever, and because you love them, that would destroy you. So you keep your distance. Love is the duration of your silence, a quiet filled with the screaming truths you keep locked behind your lips.