Love, lose, build walls. Repeat.

I am struggling to put things together in my mind. I have this whole concept I'm struggling with, phrased perfectly my Jonathan Safran Foer in his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

"We need much bigger pockets, I thought as I lay in bed, counting off the seven minutes that it takes a normal person to fall asleep. We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the whole universe. Eight minutes thirty-two seconds... But I knew that there couldn't be pockets that enormous. In the end, everyone loses everyone."

It's this desire to hold everyone and everything close, to never forget, to carry all of it forward with me. It's something I've struggled with since June or July. I wanted so much to bring everyone I loved then with me to the place I am now. I wanted to keep them safe with me. I wanted Sonic runs with Taylor to stay intact; I wanted holding hands and movies with Jake to keep happening; I wanted breakfasts with Kendel, Ryn, Mariah, Marshal, Christiana, and Jordan to continue. And now, I've made new friends and connections here--sure, they don't replace the old ones, they're just different--and I don't want to let go of them either as I go away to college.

I'm dealing with a compounded feeling of loss for my family, my old friends, and my new friends. I want pockets for all of them, I want a place for each person in my dorm room, and I want to carry them with me everywhere. While every single person will be there for me for likely the rest of my life, and I'll carry them in my heart, I still feel like I'm losing everybody.

All of this loss shuts me down. It's like losing too much blood: your body can't function without it. I feel like I've been drained of my blood. I'm wilting, fast. I want to staunch the flow. It seems the only way to make this kind of loss cease is to never make the gains of connection in the first place. It means never being vulnerable and open to people. It means never loving anyone again. It means ceasing to love the people I have now.

I have a huge heart, I've decided. I can't cease to love. I love even when it hurts me. I can't get this heart to stop pumping; so as fast as I'm bleeding out over losses, I'm bleeding out love. I feel like I'm giving, giving, and giving. There isn't enough income to cover all of my outgo, it seems. Maybe it's just that the income is in foreign money, something I can't understand.

These seem to be my ongoing problems: love, lose, build walls. Love, lose, build walls. Love, lose, build walls. What exactly IS my problem?! Can someone come into my life that I love, that loves me, that I don't want to push away, that doesn't push me away, and that mostly keeps me from building walls? Don't pull out God on me right now, because I know that God loves me like that. I just want a human that can express it to me in a way I understand, in a tangible way.

This is why I think it might be better for me to be alone.

My walls are high and wide right now. Nothing is getting through them.

Yet, all I want is someone to take the time to peel away the layers of my defense to get to the heart of me, to kiss and heal the wounds made by both myself and others, and to fight to stay with me.

That is the center of my problem.