Razors and Maps

"You have been so calm. I cannot believe that you are not falling apart after what has happened." her friend said from across the room.

She glanced up from the drink she was mixing at the counter in the kitchen and shrugged.
"I am done falling apart. I did that a few too many times and where did it get me?" she said then sipped at her drink.
Vodka, the drink that takes the pain away.

"Yeah but this time it is done. Truly done. You sent that email and got no response. You basically said goodbye to another person whom you love." Her friend sat on the couch shaking her head because she just did not understand.
The problem was that she, herself, understood all too well what happened in both cases and in reality, it had nothing to do with her. Those boys, cause they were not men for running away like thieves in the night with her heart, left because because they could not handle it. Could not handle looking her in the eye with the truth.
Another sip of the vodka and she sighed loudly,.

"When you love someone.... truly love them, friend or lover, you lay your heart open to them." she said as she walked towards where her friend sat. She could feel the lump in her throat growing as she thought about the pain she had endured, the loss, the feelings of not being good enough. She shook it off then continued.
"You give them a part of yourself that you give to no one else, and you let them inside a part of you that only they can hurt - you literally hand them the razor with a map of where to cut deepest and most painfully on your heart and soul."

She took another drink and sat down beside her friend on the couch.

"You can either crumble under that pain, realizing that the ones you loved the most just tore you apart or you can allow the healing to scar you up. Then once those scars are in place you can look down at the mass of pain that lies there and face it down. You can learn from it and realize that whatever they did was not to you. It was not about you. Actually, it had nothing to do with you. It was all about them, their fear and their need to run away from something they could not control."

She downed her drink and stared her friend in the eye and said.

"But I can control how I react to such things. How I perceive what happened and as I took a step backwards I saw that I was really the one who escaped with only a few scars for my trouble. They will never have healing because they never faced what they had before them. A lifetime of what ifs. That, my friend, is something I would not trade my scarred up heart for."