It’s funny, isn’t it? How quickly the mind can turn on itself. How it can swing like a pendulum between opposites so violently that you begin to wonder if there was ever any balance to begin with. One moment it is love, the next it is hate. One breath it is affection, the next it is indifference. Like and dislike. Longing and disgust. Hope and resignation.
The mind changes its story so often that it becomes impossible to know which version is true.
And the heart is no better. We like to pretend the heart is noble, steadfast, certain in what it wants. We romanticize it as though it always knows the way. But mine feels fickle, unreliable, impossible to reason with. It clings when it should let go. It mourns what wounded it. It reaches for what it knows can hurt it again. It wants tenderness while simultaneously building walls against it.
Make up your damn mind. Make it make sense.
I am tired. So tired of feeling everything and nothing at all, all at the same time. Tired of being crowded by emotions I cannot sort through. Tired of trying to name feelings that refuse to stay still long enough to be understood. Tired of carrying contradictions inside my chest like they belong there.
How can a person feel overflowing and hollow in the same moment? How can the same heart ache with love while hardening itself with resentment? How can grief and desire sit at the same table and call themselves home?
I do not know.
One hour I feel nothing but love. Warm, forgiving, soft love that remembers every reason I stayed, every tenderness that made me believe, every moment that convinced me this pain was worth enduring.
Then the next hour—no, the next minute, the next second—I feel nothing but disdain. I feel the sting of betrayal, the humiliation of hoping too long, the exhaustion of being wounded by what I wanted most. I feel pain sharpen itself into anger. I feel affection rot into bitterness before my eyes.
It changes that quickly.
Sometimes I wonder if this is what heartbreak truly is: not sadness, but confusion. Not simply losing someone, but losing certainty. Losing trust in your own emotions. Losing the ability to tell whether what you feel is devotion or damage.
Maybe I am in love.
Maybe I am grieving the version of love I wanted. Maybe I am addicted to potential. Maybe I am attached to memory more than reality. Maybe I am mourning something that never fully existed except in my own hopeful imagination.
Or maybe I am just crazy. Maybe I need to be medicated, sedated, quieted. Maybe there is a name for this chaos that lives between the ribs. Maybe there is a prescription for a heart that cannot choose between holding on and letting go.
But if I am honest, I think this turmoil is less madness and more evidence of being human.
Because love is rarely clean. It is messy, contradictory, irrational. It leaves behind feelings that do not line up neatly into categories. You can love someone and resent them. Miss them and want freedom from them. Crave their touch and recoil from their damage. Wish them well and never want to see them again.
Perhaps the real exhaustion comes from expecting the heart to be simple when it has never been simple at all.
Still, I wish it would choose something.
Love me wholly or let me hate in peace. Hold on or let go. Stay warm or turn cold. But stop dragging me back and forth through every season in a single day.
Because I am tired.
So very tired.
-Bella Imperia
Bella Imperia: The Things I Don't Say 
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