I have never learnt to live in moderation. I either make people my homes or start searching for the nearest exit. There has never been a middle ground. It is unfortunate how easily my heart turns simple relationships into labyrinths.
I have heard of migratory birds returning to the same sky every year, roots growing blindly into the earth in search of warmth, rivers surrendering themselves to oceans without asking what waits beneath the surface. But my mind plays tricks on me. I cannot simply let things be. I cannot surrender. I crave control over situations that were never mine to command, as though certainty were something that could be negotiated.
It feels like standing on the edge of a sea.
I love beaches. I love water. I love the rhythm of waves folding into themselves. Yet my fear of being stung by a jellyfish is so immense that I hesitate to let the water kiss my feet. I become an architect of excuses.
Inside me, my mind and my heart are arguing over the same sea. My mind tells me to stop being irrational, to let go, because whatever happens, happens. My heart remembers the afternoon my feet bled after I stepped on a broken seashell. One remembers possibility. The other archives pain.
Sometimes I convince myself that distance will help. That if I stop replying, silence my notifications, disappear for a while, I will finally feel lighter. But absence has never been quiet inside my head. Even when my phone falls silent, my mind does not. It keeps replaying songs, conversations, laughter, unfinished sentences, every ordinary moment that somehow became sacred in hindsight.
Even when I know I want to leave the sea, I cannot help wondering if I am walking away from the coral, the sunrise reflected on the waves, the quiet miracles hidden beneath the surface. But I am equally afraid of stepping into it.
New friendships excite me. I love the season of discovering another person, when every conversation feels like opening another window in a house you have never entered before. But the deeper I know them, the more unfamiliar they begin to seem. It is not because they have changed. It is because they have become real. And reality frightens me far more than mystery ever could.
So I begin longing for the beginning. For the effortless version of us before expectations arrived. Before vulnerability unpacked its suitcase. Before affection became something that could be lost.
I feel like a pendulum that has forgotten it was built to measure time, not spend its entire existence swinging between extremes. Forever moving. Never arriving.
What is the point of all this?
I wish I could tell you I am figuring it out. I am not even close.
Even today, I find myself reaching for someone’s hand while another part of me is already preparing to let it go. Maybe someday this tsunami inside me will remember that not every shoreline hides a jellyfish. That not every wave is a warning. That not every open sea is waiting to swallow me whole.
Maybe one day I will stop mistaking safety for surrender. But for now, coming close still feels like being consumed.
You speak of jellyfish and broken shells, but these are not the things that keep you from the water. What terrifies you is that the sea is free. It owes you no guarantees. Love, friendship, devotion—all the things you cherish—remain forever beyond your control. And the proudest suffering of the human heart is its refusal to accept this.
Beautifully expressed! This reminded so much of myself. And also gave me a new perspective about how I have been dealing with things during at the shore in many areas of my life. So I guess it's time for some deep sea diving now.