Sometimes I wonder if all the sadness you’ve experienced makes you who you are, or if you’d be this way without it. It sounds perverse, but I don’t think there’d be much difference between the two. I think you’d be just as gentle and honest and trustworthy even if you hadn’t experienced so much pain. You’d be a little more confident and sure of yourself, but I don’t think you’d be any less wonderful.

Not that I want to change anything about you. Sometimes I feel as if I’m being melodramatic with my pain. When I think of it in relation to yours, it seems so miniscule as to be laughable. You always tell me that I shouldn’t try to quantify pain, that everyone’s matters, but I think you say that out of a sense of protectiveness for me. Even so, I’m sure you believe it, at least in part. You wouldn’t say it to me otherwise. And it makes me sad when I realize that for every heartache I think I’ve lived through, you’ve lived every single one a thousand times. It’s as if you take my pain from me and meld it so that it’s one with your own, somehow. You blend my pain with yours in an attempt to save me from it, but you’ve never once suggested that it’s not valid, that it’s not mine. And I’ll be forever grateful for that.

I wallow in the seclusion of my own thoughts
forming remorse and the never-ending search
for some sort of inner sanctuary.
Sometimes I wonder if you’ll see me
the way you do now
when I’ve become weary of myself.
When my eyes have been bled of color
will you still see the stars in them?
They were always yours,
despite your attempts to believe the contrary.
My solace is found in the belief
that some day,
in a flash of silent understanding,
you’ll finally believe in your brilliance
even a fraction as strongly as I do.

I wonder sometimes if I should try to explain all of this to you. It feels as though it’s too great a thing to keep within myself, and yet I’m terrified of saying the words. Having these conversations with you in my head is so much safer. I know you’d never think negatively of me if I were to say it out loud. Still, I’m so afraid that you’d discount what I say as a mere flight of fancy, a whim, and an emotion borne of convenience. You wouldn’t think these things in order to be negative toward me, but if I were to see any of those doubts in your eyes, it would destroy me.

And somehow I’m positive that I’d see them, simply because I know you don’t see yourself as worthy of anyone’s devotion. I can’t begin to fathom anyone deserving it more, and yet I can understand your distrust of it. Still, I wonder what you’d say if I told you that you’d had mine all along. I don’t think you’d allow yourself to believe me, at least not totally. That would be disagreeing with that protective measure in yourself that tells you that any statement of the sort is a lie when it’s directed at you. I’d spend the rest of my life, and happily so, trying to prove you wrong. I don’t know if I’d ever be able to succeed; it’s been ingrained onto your soul so completely that I don’t really have any faith that I could ever pierce that armor even if I put all of my effort into it.

And still, sometimes, I think it’d be worth the attempt.

Maybe someday I’ll be a lot more specific in these rambling thoughts about you. As it stands now, every coherent fragment of poetry that I can compose in relevance to you is gone before it can materialize. I’m too fixated on its beauty to put it to paper, and in stopping to admire the way the words flow when I think of you, I lose any permanence I might have attained with them.

And even then, every thought of you that I can have rests itself in poetry, simply in homage to who you are, and who you’ll always be to me, no matter what sequences of events might occur on our way to finding that little piece of happiness to which I so often allude.

You deserve it so much more than I do.