The Architecture of Fear and Love

Fear is loud,
it is what the eye keeps,
what the body remembers,
what turns into the language
that shows up in your thoughts.

Those were the most brutal truths I had to face.

The story was written in my bones,
attaching itself to stitches,
thread by thread,
mistake by mistake,
in my breath,
in the tiny pulse
of my nervous system,
turning a drizzle into storms,
growing larger than the sky,
forcing me to wear bruises every evening.

When my own darkness appeared on the road,
widening in different forms,
forcing me to face
everything I shoved within,
I travelled through memories,
drifting between sadness and joy,
battling to prove
I deserved warmth.

My family was loving, yes,
but my spirit grew tired,
and the air thickened
with my father’s spoken words:
You're weak.
Too vulnerable.
The world will break you
if you keep crying.
And all the things left unsaid.

I tried to pretend I was strong,
while everything within
was shattered and broken,
begging for a word.

A recurring need to take deep breaths,
yet none of them truly filling my lungs with oxygen.
Still, I left a window open
to invite the air after the rain.

And when the storms ended,
I enjoyed my walks,
where silence fused itself
with the liveliness of streets,
where the air felt fresh,
and a quiet kind of calm stayed.

Having to read rooms,
shifts in moods,
silences louder
than any spoken words,
fear became a language
I learned fluently.

Love did not always speak that clearly.

Love has fewer guarantees.
It does not reward control.
I was excited by its arrival,
curious by nature.
I kept asking,
Who sent you?
Where does this warmth belong?

Yet it did not explain itself.
It asked me to stay,
while I could not stay with myself.

Growing up with a perfectionist father,
I did not want control,
I needed it,
to make sure everything stayed flawless.

In time, life lost its colours.
A shelf filled with books,
carrying a lifetime of memories,
began staging a black and white movie
of never being chosen,
never truly being seen.

I was never enough,
not really.

Love asks you to be present
without knowing the outcome.
My mind saw too far
to live comfortably in the present,
claiming imagined futures
as if they were already here.

My identity wrapped itself
around the illusions I created,
demanding life to unfold
in a certain way,
not allowing possibilities to expand.

Love came with conditions,
timing issues,
ruptures.
It was not stable.
My psyche learned
not to rely on it for orientation.

So fear became the map,
keeping me emotionally alert,
helping me survive disappointment,
making sense of inconsistencies
and recurrent absences.

Love required a different kind of knowing.
Not analysis,
but embodiment.
Not prediction,
but presence.
Not vigilance,
but trust.

The kind of knowing develops
after safety,
not before it.

Yet I did not need to understand love
to experience it.
It was not something I can chase
or shape myself to fit.

It is the quiet moments
I have with myself
while drinking my morning coffee.
The feeling that lingers
when I finish writing a piece
I am proud of,
followed by one last read,
as I roll myself a cigarette
and smoke it while reading my own words.

It is the knowing
that I will always have myself,
and that I have the world’s best community
to share my hundredth piece with.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.