When I was young,

Living in a world of hate,

My mind created a cage.

It was told that love has chains,

Love must be restrained,

There is only one way that love can be.

 

So my mind locked my heart away.

No longer could my heart convey

The emotions I was feeling.

It wasn’t my minds fault

That the cage was built

And my heart was stopped from speaking.

 

She thought she was doing what was best for me

So when my heart was drawn to one

My mind said “No, not her, These are the ones you’re supposed to want.”

So, I lived my life thinking, but not believing,

That those were the ones I liked,

That’s what everyone around me seemed to think.

 

As soon as I heard it may be okay

To love the one I thought I wasn’t supposed to

I knew it was true.

But because of all the years my heart had spent

Locked in a cage with so much to say

I had no idea it was gone.

 

A few years more and I had begun to think

That love would always feel as though

I was incomplete.

A few years later and suddenly

I felt my heart speak

It had been so long I almost didn’t recognize her voice.

 

The cage my mind had once built

Around my heart was gone,

And my heart finally decided to tell me.

She had spent so long

Unable to speak

That she wasn’t sure she still could.

 

I realized with a start,

Love wasn’t incomplete,

I had only never felt it,

Not since the girl on the playground

I never knew why I was so drawn to her,

So determined to get close to her.

 

I didn’t know until years later,

When a different girl spoke,

And my heart breathed,

And the girl smiled,

And for the first time since the playground,

My heart remembered what it was like to beat.

 

Christiantha C - October 19, 2018