The Hardest Part Is Putting Your Heart On The Line

You see her trace across that floor for the hundredth time. Ninety-nine times up to now, you have always underestimated what she does to you when she offers a smile and a look deep into your soul. Ninety-nine times, maybe more, you have thought about your life in a different light—in her light. Conversations are easy with her; they take the night away to some place where time doesn’t exist and you could stay forever. This place has a closing time, though, and so all good things must come to an end. As you walk her out, you feel the words on the tip of your tongue, but they are stolen again in a taxi ride east back to home.

The hardest part is setting your heart out on the line. Does it fall or does it fly? Will she say the words back to you, or will she turn and say that maybe now the timing is not best? The worst thing about it all is that you can feel things for a person so deep and so rare and they don’t feel it back for you. You’ll run and you’ll hide. You’ll tear the house down. Your heart will break and mend, but you’ll feel as if you have been scarred from the very thought of not being able to tell her the words you always imagined saying, finding out one day that it’s too late.

To be the bigger man is to take the greatest risk of all, and that is withholding all your feelings for her because you thought that it wasn’t what you thought she wanted to hear at the time. You gave her space to clear her mind and let her see the other side. The thing is, the one saying her name sure didn’t think the same. Maybe you were a fool? Maybe you should have jumped the gun and taken a leap into the unknown? Maybe what you did was right? You thought it was because it is who you are. You often think whether you left it too late, as if she was anticipating the words you never came to say. You have found now that she will wait around for no one and that when that little bit of magic sweeps her off her feet, her heart is captured. It could have been you, but should-have’s and would-have’s are all part and parcel of trying to entice a love so brand new.

Her name you knew all too well and her face was very familiar. Her voice could be heard bouncing around the walls of any room she set foot in, and her eyes cast you away to a world where there was no pain. To be held in her universe, you imagined, was to be walking this world untouched and untamed. First impressions will decide the game, and from yours, you knew that this one would be harder to turn back from once she had let you in.

You and her were the ones that never were, the greatest story to never to be told, so they say. The weeks, the months and the years eventually began to fade, but you never forgot the love you left to waste. From the moment you met her eyes, you knew that nothing would ever be the same again, no matter how life planned out. Ninety-nine times you underestimated the power a feeling could hold, and on the hundredth time, you finally realized why. Scared, anxious, nervous, and worried that you couldn’t ever be enough. The best thing about love, however, is that it knows no bounds. It’s not always looks, it’s not always a laugh or a smile or even a kiss, but it is the heart and the soul of a person, and on the hundredth and first time, it seemed as if she disproved all logic that the hardest part is setting your heart on the line.

For a hundred times, it was always you who was holding the look and attempting to play the game, but when it happened for the first time that she looked your way, not once but twice, everything changed. She realized that love wasn’t brand new, that it had always lived in this very place. She laughed and she smiled as she said your name softly. You realized that all the lonely nights and the pain all added up to this, that all it took was for her to look at you and look back again, the way you had always done. It had been a long time, but the right time doesn’t always come immediately.

The hardest part is setting your heart out on the line. Does it fall or does it fly? Well, when she finally said those three little words back to you, it flew; it soared high into a lovers’ sky.