Before any of this begins, I would like to you know a few things. Just a few, small, trivial things.

I promise.

Your face never seems to feel the same after tears pass over your cheeks. You can't fake that kind of clean, that kind of clear, fresh sadness that you just wiped away with a dirty hand or your cold sleeve. Your eyes become red after you douse them with salt and sorrow. They show inside weariness and unforgiveable weakness. They expose you to a world where the air is thin and the words break like brittle leaves in autumn, like shattering glass and tender ice and the sound is just as clear and final.

You try to pick up the pieces of yourself that fell to the floor, and mop up whatever you can so that no one can see what you've done. You scratch and scrape at the tile under your feet, clawing at invisible drops of an injured heart, hopeing like hell that someone doesn't walk through the door, or around the corner to where you are, bent over spilled milk and tears and pain that they're likely to step on if they get too close.

The feet of those that we love can crush any and all of our dreams if we let them get too close. You can't let them have whats come out of your eyes. You can't let them see what others have done to you, and what you do to yourself because they are ones that have the sharpest daggers, the kind you can't feel until its in your back and you're on the floor, begging God to say that it wasn't them who left you there.

But you turn around and they're still standing there, curious to see what their handiwork has done and how long it will take you to clean up the mess.

And you have to clean up the mess because you can't let the rest of them know you've been wounded.

You mustn't let them see you because all they can do is hurt, no matter how lovely the sentiment starts out to be.