Projections

There's a seed in my mind that I keep watering unintentionally. I can't help it. Maybe it's that cat-like curiosity that pursues its growth. Watching what unfolds with each specialized leaf. And the seedling just grows as it was meant to do. Feeding off of me as its source of soil and the undesignated watering from my curious nature. I watch it grow and try to study the meaning behind each interpretation of every leaf, branch, and stem. A growing plant that strives for the light it only gets on my good days.

I often think about a life with you. I knew from the start of our first encounter how uncontrollable my incessantly beating heart would rage for a life with you. Even the things you do that our world marks as annoying are precious to me. And I can only see you with glasses made with perfectionism lenses. You are ideally perfect for me and doubts of this have never existed.

Yet you don't reciprocate what I see. You can't. And I turn to my seedling for advice on the matter. On some leaves I see the recognition of my love for you. On other leaves I learn that although you recognize how hard I've fallen for you, you don't feel the same way. I learn that you're perfect for me and that I am not perfect for you. Some leaves tell me you don't see me at all; that I'm just a zero, a mere placeholder in your life. And I begin to wonder how my heart is capable of such deception. How is it possible that what I see and feel is strictly one-sided? And I ask my seedling but it has no answers for me. So I water it once more and wait for a new leaf to sprout in the hopes that it will have a term for understanding you.

As a good day passes by my seedling gets the light it desperately craves for the slightest microsecond. And a new leaf came to be. I anxiously begin reading the lineage of its veins and try to make sense of its colors. I find that how I see you, and the made up life we have together, is a projection of what my heart feels. Because my heart is not your heart the certainty that we are a match is actually not so certain. And my bones ache and quiver because they know something is skewed. They know it cannot be possible that I feel so strongly about you and you have no notion of us. So I wait for another leaf to show me your side of the story.

Over the years I've grown keen on the art of reading body language. And I've mastered my intuition to guide my senses. You flirt back and I am dangerously aware of it. You tell me that you've entertained the idea of us as I have done since meeting you. My bones are screeching to assert their correct and wise presumptions. My heart is aggressively yet slowly throbbing. There was recognition after all. And we both knew it. But something doesn't sit right with you. You're afraid of us. So you leave our life alone and I succumb to the quicksand you lured me into.

After suffocating from a breathless heart, I try to understand the purpose of having grown my seedling. It's a tree now. And the roots are thick and tangled throughout the depths of my hollowed mind. There are too many leaves to study and none of them offer any clarity. I'm left to wonder why you wouldn't choose our life knowing it would be great. Hot tears roll down my face and water the tree again. A leaf fell down and gently grazed my hands. It read that love is blind. That I can't blame you for not understanding. It read that the death of this leaf marks the beginning of a new love. With the deepest breath I reached for a fallen acorn and I planted it nearby with strong reservation. Reluctant to try again, that cat-like curiosity pursued its growth. And now there's a seed in my mind that I keep watering unintentionally.