Colors

Life has a terrible way of happening to me. To empathize with me try to imagine this:

You know how when you love someone, it's called giving your heart to them, you love them with your whole heart, or your heart belongs to them? What if you could literally give your heart to someone? Imagine you are in a world where you literally give your heart to the people you love, where hearts were made of glass, and each person could give their own special color to the hearts of others. When you love someone with all your heart, you would give your whole heart to them, and they would do with it what they pleased, perhaps adding some of their color here, or there. Now once your heart is given, you can take it back unless it is drastically and fundamentally changed by the person you've given it to. At that point, it must be replaced with the other's heart, because the heart that was once yours is now theirs completely.

Imagine your heart is broken. Not only broken, but the pieces are crumbling to dust. You can't fix it, and every time you try, each piece you touch crumbles farther.

Then along comes this person, who is so different from you, wild and crazy, yet caring, and every time they touch a piece, it connects to another and changes color and shape. This keeps happening, and you find that your heart is a new size and shape, and it is fixed, but not fixed. Fixed because it is once again a whole heart, and not fixed, because it loses it's color unless you are with that crazy, wonderful person. Up until this point, you had never had any knowledge that anything was missing, no desire for color in your life, and no way to get any color if you'd wanted it. You offer your heart to this person, so the color and the life will stay in it. 

They start getting afraid at how much you want to be with them, and they begin to run away from you. When they run away from you, the color is stripped from your heart, leaving pain where once was joy. You pursue them, because the farther they run from you, the more intense the pain gets. Finally, you catch up, and some color returns, but they refuse to put all the color back. So you must wait. There is nothing you can do to change them. They don't want to change. You see their heart has very little color. Some of it you recognize as your own, but only a very little bit. You want to see them happy, the way you were happy when they colored in your heart. They can't see your heart. They don't want to see it. When they see your heart, half colored, they are sad, and they feel sad that your heart is half in pain. You can see their heart though, and you know that a heart like that must hurt. You wish that you knew how to color it all in, but you don't, and this makes you sadder than you were when you were only in pain. If only they would show you how, you would color their heart in for them, and then they wouldn't hurt anymore. However, they won't tell you, no matter how hard you try to help them be happy. One day, they put a little more color back into your heart, and your heart feels lighter than it has in a month or two. You are very happy. Then they ask you a terrible question: "It's not worth it to see you if you are dying every time, so are we going to fix this by you not liking me, or by us not being friends anymore?" You realize that they don't want to be the color of your heart. They don't want your heart at all, but they want you to be their friend. You want them to be the color of your heart. Their color is the only one that seems to fit the new shape they've given your heart. Other people start to notice you, and want to fill your heart with their color, but their colors won't stick on this shape. Sometimes you wish those colors would stick, but the only color that will stick is the color that wonderful person put in your heart, and then took. They don't want you to need their color to fill your heart, because they are afraid of not being afraid. They don't want to put their color into your heart, because then your color may begin to grow in theirs. They fear the unknown, but instead of learning the unknown, and therefore changing the unknown to the known, they are paralyzed and refuse to change the unknown into what is known. You are afraid that if they won't let things be different, you will not only be stuck like this, but stuck like this with no hope of anything but being left by your wonderful person. Both of you fear, and that keeps you from being the color of the other's heart. It is this fear that is your undoing. Your heart seems to both gain and lose color as you are near the wonderful person. The color of your heart fills as it is embraced by your friend, and as it is pushed away from the heart of this one who changed you, it empties of its color.
Life with them means an endless torment where you are both hurt and healed at once. Life without them means you will live a life which is empty of color. Which would you choose?