To The Girls With Damaged Hearts

This is for the girls who had their hearts smashed, stabbed, stitched up and stomped on.

This is for the girls who let down their walls only to invite in a Trojan Horse, which wrecked the towers and battlements of their innocence.

This is for the girls who ended up shivering, naked in the snow, because the men they loved tore the clothes from their backs and left them bleeding.

This, my darling girls, is for you.

Sometimes, I can only laugh at my own impaired heart. The uneven beats (due to smoking, the doctors told me, though I still blame it on the many times my heart has been broken). The battered and dusty look of it. The way it shoots out bullets of blood when I feel vulnerable. My heart is a wreckage compared to the pristine condition it was in, before love hit me like a battering ram and left me in splinters. The first time my heart was broken, I repaired it with the naivete of youth. A few bandages, the elixir of time, and I was as good as new.

Right?

Now I laugh. Where were the catapults? The moats filled with creatures long of tooth and always hungry? The flaming arrows raining down on anyone that dared breach my defenses?

Does this sound familiar?

Have you, too, closed yourself off from the warfare of winning hearts (or losing them, as the case may be)?

Have you retreated into the deepest cavern of your spirit, holding your heart like a prisoner of warm, refusing to part with it?

Have you been called cold, distant or callous because you shut off your emotions in order to stay safe and unchanged within your own panic room?

I know I have.

So you save yourself from heartache. You don’t give in to the butterflies and the shivers. You look away from the shy barista as the local coffee shop when he doesn’t charge you for anything more than a smile. You hastily put on headphones when that handsome stranger recklessly asks you what your name is, pretending you haven’t heard. You run for the exit when the lead singer of a new band begins to croon about wanting to find love, slyly catching your eye from across the room. You ignore the messages and comments on your instagram from beautiful or interesting people who are sincerely interested in you.

You won’t get your heart broken again, no.

But you won’t experience love again, either.

Maybe it’s time again, to take chances. Maybe now is the time to open that poor, battered heart to beautiful chances and kismet. Maybe it’s time to stop being afraid.

There might be more battles, true. Sieges meant to break and discourage you. Injuries, blood and loss.

But, beautiful girls, there will also be hope.

And I think we’ve lost that for long enough, haven’t we?