Bruised Not Broken

Love scares me. It does. The poet Audre Lorde once said "when we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish."
And we are afraid love will never return, leaving us with alone with holes in our hearts as big as the craters on the moon.
I haven't loved as much as I should because I fear my heart won't be able to take it, that I will go down with one sucker punch to the gut. I am afraid of rejection. We all are.
But as I've grown older, I realize that to love is to risk rejection and to love is to open yourself up to be wounded.
That's why we are careful about who we open our hearts to, who we allow into that sacred place. We are hardwired for self-protection, to do what is necessary to survive.
And it hurts when someone you spent hours and hours with, holding their hands, laughing with, kissing, counting the moments apart before you can see each other again, is gone because this just won't work anymore. The connection is lost. The pain is so much that the thought of seeing her again is too much and you go about the business of deleting her from your life, as impossible as that may be.
But I believe that love is worth it. It has to be. And I have to have faith that even if this love doesn't work out, love in the end will win out.
I believe we are stronger than we ever thought we could be and that we only find our strength through pain, when our faith is tested, when we choose to love in places where hate wants to dominate.
Love is a choice, a scary choice, because there's no guarantee that the love we give will be received in the same way. There's no guarantee that we won't get hurt.
Yet, if all we are is afraid of the bad that might happen, we miss the good. So like some adrenaline-addicted bungee jumper, I take the plunge, with my eyes open and my brain working, into the deep unknown, my heart uncaged, sifting through the ne'er-do-wells to find her, the one who is worth all the hell, the slice of heaven on earth that I would journey to Hades to get. That one because she's worth everything and even if in the end, she wasn't, taking the chance was better than waiting in the wings and doing nothing.
Yes, love, all messy and whatnot, scares me but I don't want to live my life paralyzed by fear. I don't want to protect my heart so much that I lock everyone out. Love is a gift from God and you should share it as much as you can.
As the song says, the wounds will mend, you'll get back on your feet and you will love again. You are not broken.