Enough, Catullus.

I've grown so accustomed to earning love -be it by favours, self-sacrifice or total self-annihilation- that when it's given to me too easily, I value it less than I would have had I toiled to feel its cold, gangly limbs in my choking grip.

I would give up plans on request, swallowed anger as it crawled its way to the tip of my tongue, tolerated being shoved into the 'option' bin for weeks on end, forgive apologize forgive apologize forgive apologize (repeat), all for a chance to feel indispensable to anyone who was willing, or foolish enough, to board my crazy train. I gave so much because I wanted to be everything, all at once. We would both be so wrung out from the constant battle for control that, in the end, no one even bothered to steer anymore.

If choices were only simple dichotomies of pros and cons, much care would be put into making lists of evaluations on over-sized yellow Post-it notes. But there is no way of stopping the rational mind from deliberating the ripple effects of precarious endeavours. Guidelines are adjusted to fit my fears and my skepticism, so much so that the bar just keeps getting higher and higher.

The basic breakdown of this is you can't tell if someone has a tight grip on life just by holding his hand. It takes valuable time to measure the worth of anyone's word, time which can be spent in idle wonderment of the world, with its abundance of unassuming affection. So why risk it?

I don't know exactly what is at stake, but I know something is; and I'm in no position to give it up.