My heart gets broken. A lot.

I’m either all in or all out. Like breaking bones, I never do anything halfway.

I fall for people, even the people I know I should not, and I fall for them hard. With reckless abandon. I fling myself off the precipice and think, “This may end in disaster but I prefer the disaster to emptiness.”

My heart gets broken a lot and at any given time, I am trying to stitch back together that which many would say should never have been broken. My heart doesn’t know timelines or logic or rationality. All it knows is connection and what reached out for me in the void.

I am both afraid and eager. I prefer those who are ever so slightly distant from me, the ones I need to chase because that distance, though I say I hate it, is really a measure of safety. I tell myself it’s fine, you’re not too close, and that your absence from me wouldn’t hurt that much.

But it does.

If someone likes me too much, if they show too much interest, it makes my skin crawl. Because suddenly I feel this overwhelming pressure to treat your heart well. I don’t want to be the heart breaker. I do much better as the heart broken. I don’t want to break your heart so if you get too close, too fast, then I’m like a deer.

I will run.

But if you stay, just ever so much out of reach, I will drop it all for you. I will be daydreaming scenarios that could never be. I am the chaser, not the chased. The broken, not the breaker.

I have whispered a million I love yous to a thousand faces, and I don’t think that cheapens it at all. People call it desperate, and yes, I know I look for love in the wrong places, but at least I am looking.

I would much rather be broken hearted than heartless.

It doesn’t mean that all those loves are equal. There were the small loves, the brief loves. There were also the big loves. The loves that I didn’t just whisper but screamed from the rooftops. The loves I wrapped around myself like a cocoon and lost myself in it. The loves that didn’t make me run or chase but the loves where I stayed. I rested. I dreamed.

The big love that is a part of my DNA.

For every heart break, for every pain of a love not returned, I am reminded that I am not desperate. I am fearless. I love with reckless abandon in a world that is so detached. And each time, I pick myself up and say “One more time” until I find that forever love,

The one that ends the heart break.

But I carry them with me, all my many loves, knowing that they couldn’t be what I needed and I couldn’t be what they needed, but somewhere out there, the one who needs me and the one I need is trying to find me as well.