How to Let People in without Locking Yourself Out.
{Via MorningMist.tumblr.com}
Sometimes people feel like the sunrise.
They start slowly, they edge towards you. Never hesitating, just inching closer at the perfect intervals. People can be like the calm rise of the sun every morning, making you so glad you woke up early enough to catch the blotchy streaks reign over your bed.
But other times, people feel more like the end of a bad dream, when you’re grainy and stuck; you’re lucid but undone. They leave you stirred and chilled with nothing but dust in your eyes.
The other day I woke up from one of these bad dreams and it got me thinking about how much easier it is to love things versus people. With things, you get to be in control of all the moving, the mending, the breaking and the leaving.
I love people, and I wouldn’t want to live that way. But some days it just gets hard.
Some days I just want to sleep, and leave everyone stuck under my eyelids where they won’t be allowed to bother me for at least a couple hours. So I decided to write myself a How To Guide, of sorts. I decided that if I was going to choose people over things, I needed to make sure I knew how to pick them.
There are people whose very presence looks likes the muted gray morning you just slept through. They are dusky and sluggish, and they slow you down. Their colors bleed through you excessively.
How to stop the bleeding: Cut them out. Walk away. The truth is that some people can’t love you. But that’s their hang up, not yours. You are fiery reds and pinched pink cheeks in the sunlight. You don’t need to stand by and watch people reek of beige undertones.
***
There are people who keep you in secret, who lock you up for rainy days when you look warm enough to dry their dampened clothes. You are their silent refuge. They keep you hidden in their fading smirk, but that’s not where you belong.
How to stop hiding: Do not let yourself be content being someone’s ghost. You are not the pale pink reminder of a time when they actually felt something. You are nobody’s weighty, lethargic bitterness.
***
There are people who want you to stay stuck in a pristine canister above their fireplace, never been touched before they decided to drape their mutty gloves over your body.
How to stop being anyone’s chastity (unless you want to be): Someone once told me that I had eyes that made him feel pure. But I didn’t want to be someone’s purity. I can barely manage to be my own. And on some days, I don’t want to be.
You are impulse. You are stranded inhibition. You are, sometimes, the aftertaste of ecstasy and the curvature of a spine as your lover shifts under you. Let yourself be this. You are no one’s mint condition classic. You touch and you tug and you feel, when you get the urge.
***
There are people who latch onto the flecks of doubt that you sometimes let creep up your throat. They hear these louder and brighter than you ever meant for them to be heard, and then hold them up in the light as if to blind you. Their words always seem to drip with thick coats of bitterness and something that looks like putrid honey (it’s probably jealously).
How to stop the doubt: Rain traces the path of your face and gets stuck wherever your curves catch it. Doubt, like rain, can get stuck if you let it. Set up road blocks, don’t let the doubt through. Train yourself to recognize it in people — the bitterness, the spite, the envy, the reluctance. Learn how these things project themselves and take various shapes, some even look like support or good advice.
You know those proverbial grains of salt people are always telling you to take their statements with? Start taking it all with a handful, as opposed to the grain. Take people’s words with caution, and don’t ever let them taint you.
***
There are people with snakeskin charms and piano hands that make you feel every note. They slither into the depths of your soul only to rob you of your tender parts. They steal your senses and leave you struck with only the remnants of butterflies aching in your belly.
How to stop them from getting in: You can’t. People are going to worm their way into the deepest facets of you, and it’s going to feel like they are forever living in the crevices of all your vital organs. You’re going to need to let them stay. They will leave marks, and you’ll feel them like phantom limbs pressing through your body.
But you are wholeness and you are goodness and eventually, you’ll sweat them out like a wet fever.
There are people who are nothing like the one’s described on this list. These are the ones you wait on to burst through the window every morning in their silky shades of gold, just like the sunrise. These are the ones you’ll hold onto.
People > things. (The right people anyway)
*****
{Sunrise Society}
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