Dear Stranger,

Dear Stranger,
Would it take you by surprise if I told you a bit about me? Would you listen to my tales and try to find yours within them? Would you feel my spirit?
For I once had a spirit that was glowing all over my face. And I met strangers like you, some of which became my best friends, but some of my best friends have become strangers again.

Dear Stranger,
The world has broken me to pieces, and now I know I only get to find them as I choose to break again and again. I hope you find yours too. I know you must be drained by all your struggles, but I hope you know I'm willing to listen to your stories. I want you to look me in the eyes and see me for who I am, to reach out for my essence. I want you to try to get past all the layers and the rumbling storm that's making me shake on the inside. Can you feel that? Can you see me trying to keep from falling?
I want you to know that I'd rather close up on myself and find comfort in being alone, but I'm making an effort to open up to you.

Dear Stranger,
I've seen enough to make me give up on you, even before I know who you are. I have many reasons to avoid meeting your eyes as you approach me because sometimes I hope my relationship with you stays at the borders of 'Hello'. So would you see past that? Would you see past my broken smile?

Dear Stranger,
I'm sure there are things you'll understand about me, for you've also had your share of heartache. But would you be willing to face that with me? Would you get past all the superficial talks and discuss the things that truly matter to me? Would you acknowledge my feelings even if you didn't completely understand them? Would you be interested to know what makes me comfortable and what scares the hell out of me? Would you want to know the memories that stir my heart and the thoughts I can't get out of my head? Would you be gentle with my insecurities, would you be patient?

Dear Stranger,
I've had a hard time holding on to my beliefs. I've worked so hard on keeping the good things good, if that makes any sense to you. I've managed to find dreams and aspirations on the days I even lost interest in living. I still believed in love when I had every reason not to, and somehow I could still trust. But it's not as simple as it looks. Doubt is my companion with every step. And with time I've learned that it's okay to doubt to reach the solid grounds of truth.

Dear Stranger,
After so many chances lost, it's extremely difficult to give another. It gets harder to forgive too, and you become a prisoner to the memories and the pain. You become vulnerable to even the simplest human interactions. You realize that with every letting go, you've also lost some energy and gained some fear. And now fear is always side by side with hope. Sometimes I feel they've become the same thing.

Dear Stranger,
If we ever meet, I hope you'll be honest enough to trigger some courage inside of me, so that I can look you in the eyes and let your storm collide with mine, and hope that everything we have in common will bring us some peace and quiet.

Dear Stranger,
Perhaps we will fall in love with the same shades and have our tears falling to the same melodies.

Dear Stranger,
I hope that no matter what, you will always follow your heart.
Perhaps your heart will guide you to me.

Nowhere to go...

It is said that hurricanes are the world's second most dangerous natural disaster after earthquakes. However, I believe they should come first. The hurricane starts and it blows away everything, the chance of anything surviving it is almost zero. It kills everything on its way. It has no mercy. It takes no rest. It is as ugly as it is.

When it comes to one self, there is no competition. You don't experience an earthquake. Yet if you do experience a hurricane, you know it's a number one killer. It drains the life out of you while you're still breathing. And there's nothing in the world as devastating as the calm that comes after the storm.

It's in the calm that I learned that the hurricane started when I first tried to run away from everything I feared I'd become, when I took every possible road to avoid being what I hated in everyone else.
When you suffer because of people, when you've had too many awful experiences, there comes a point when you're trying so hard to resist everything that has to do with the person and what they made you feel.
You resist anger, but you find youeself angry all the time. You resist pain, but you've been hurt so long that it can no longer leave. You resist grief, but you find it with every step you take towards happiness. You resist selfishness, but how can you protect yourself in this terrible fight? And you resist fear. You resist it till you become it. You become your worst fear. You become your worst enemy.
Whether someone says it to your face, or you find it out on your own, you just realize you've become everything you've run from, and suffered from.
And after the hurricane is over, after all the tears and the heartache, you lose something as valuable as connection, not just with the world, but with yourself too.

The world has a way of being so ruthless sometimes. It allows you to know the taste of joy, of laughing your heart out, of dancing to its rhythm and feeling the beauty in it, but then it strikes you with endless shots at the heart. Something is always missing. Something is always wrong. You become a prisoner of yourself and everything you wish you could change.

When the hurricane is over, the picture is clearer. It's then that you can see that a comfort zone is only a myth, and that home can not last.
But what if home was the only thing you had? Where do you go when the storm is over? Where do you go when you want to scream your heart out and run as far as you can from your very own self?

Where do you go when there's nowhere to go...?

Pieces of the Heart

“Where do the pieces go?”, she asked all of a sudden.
“What pieces?”
“Pieces of the heart. Where do they go? How much of ourselves do we lose with every missing piece? Tell me for God’s sake!”, she yelled with tears streaming down her face, “I just want them back”, she then whispered, “I just want to feel whole again…”
And I think a few pieces of my heart disappeared somewhere.

Sometimes we find comfort in silence, in the calm after the storm. Sometimes when we are so tired of chasing the answer, we actually realize we never asked the right question. My God, we may even forget the question, or worse, forget to ask it in the first place. And that is why there are battles we never win, because we do not know how to fight them, and there are answers we are never satisfied with, because we do not really know what we are looking for…

I used to think the pieces only go missing when our hearts get broken, and to believe the idea of the whole thing as a terrible loss. But then I somehow realized we lose those parts of ourselves in the very beginning, before any heartbreak, and we do not actually lose them, we exchange them.
What if it goes like that, that with every encounter with someone, we exchange pieces of our hearts with theirs? What if we never lose them, that we just lend them to someone who needed that one piece that changes everything? And what we take back might not necessarily be equal to what we gave, but it is just what we needed as well. What if the whole process is about gaining, about accepting pieces that are not ours yet it is us they belong to?

I think our hearts were made to be broken and the pieces are meant to wander around between us leaving a different impact within each of us. I think we have to let go of some pieces in order to feel whole again, not incomplete, in order to leave some space for something we could not clearly see, in order to remind ourselves that we do not need to gather up the pieces after a heartbreak, we do not need to search outside ourselves for what we think went missing, but rather look inside.
Look closely. Look at the spaces in your heart. Look at that tiny space that used to hold a piece of your own. Does it seem empty to you? Does it mean you lost a part of yourself you can never get back, or does it actually bring you closer to the things you could never find before your heart was broken?

I always wondered why people always defined heartbreak. Like heartbreak is the end of a relationship. Heartbreak is an unreturned love. Heartbreak comes with lying, with cheating, with grief, and with death. But we forget that heartbreak also comes with life, with perfect love, and with joy.
Heartbreak has no definition and no limit.
Our hearts may break with a love so great we never thought would find us, with a song that explains all what we couldn’t find words to say, with our finger between a baby’s tiny hand, with a simple gift at the very right time. See, heartbreak also comes with hope, with gratitude, with the presence of someone, not only their absence. Heartbreak comes with sunrise and with sunset.

In all its forms, our hearts burst open to let some light in, to experience more of life’s wonders, to enjoy and appreciate its beauty, to learn, to love, and to live.

So after a long silence I manage to say, “The pieces do not go anywhere. They are always there, taking different forms, touching some lives. They represent your encounters with everyone and everything around you, and even if some days it feels some are missing, they will always come back, bringing about a new vision, a new tale…”
And I realized those few pieces of mine did not disappear, she has them now. I guess she realized it too because she smiled, so I also smiled and said, “We never lose the pieces of our hearts…”