I realize I’ve written a lot of things in my life. I’ve written a lot of rageful rants. I've written a lot of pathetic cringe-worthy poetry in my most angsty years growing up. I’ve written letters that I’ve never sent. I’ve written notes that could never cover everything my mind willed me to write. I’ve written half-finished stories, forgotten in time, collecting dust in old journals and in the files of my computer. I’ve written accounts of my days, mostly of the bad. I’ve written things I never wish for you to read.

But I could never really write the things the way my heart feels them, the way my mind whispers them. Not in the truest of the true that it is. I say so many things amongst myself in the times that I am alone, in the darkness of my bedroom, that I can never seem to write down or ever say to another person. I feel things so much more deeply, and they’re so much more complex than the way it comes about in person or on that lined journal paper that calls to me.

And in many ways it hurts. It hurts to feel these things so deeply when unable to share them. To express them in their purest, rawest way with another in order to have them understand…to have them see you. To see the beauty of your heart, the tragedy of your past—of the things you understand, the things that make you ache to the bone. To see your pure intentions, to feel your hopes the same way that you do and with the same strength of it that leaves you shaking. For them to see all that you are, really see. Beneath the flesh, beneath the bone. Within the deepest part of you; of a human being. My being. The soul. My soul. A place often indescribable. A place that is pure in all that it is, all that you are, all that I am—whatever that may be.

A place that leaves no room for question, no room for deceit. Where masks and facades disintegrate before it. A place that is felt. Something that seems so raw, so deep, so endless, so ancient. The complexity of it all that I cannot seem to share. But it is the most important, the most vital. The parts that I wish you could know, wish you could see and understand. Because it hurts too much for you not to.