I need to let myself feel this. This bone deep sadness. This cold watery heart feeling. This ache for connection, the pull of my lungs for something that is not there.

Being tough is not what I need because I do not need scar tissue. Though I feel so hurt and sad and disappointed, I need to stay tender for something better that will come along someday.

There was a guy. And I liked him very much. And too soon, even though he himself tried to warn me not to, I let him come into me. My first. And I have not seen him sense. He has not reached back to my outstretched hand. And this hand is now cold and lonely.

And I feel hurt and betrayed and disappointed and so very sad. And I have been fighting all of these feelings because they are so big. So scary. But the bigger they are, the more they refuse to go away. They become twisted demons who come back later to hurt you even more.

So I am feeling this. I am sad.

As my heart cracks open fear sneaks out with the love; a reversal of Pandora's box. I am surprised and alarmed by how my heart is calling to him already after a week and a small handful of days, by how I want him in my presence. Too much, too much! I feel like crying out. As if I am afraid that my flow of love will rush out too quickly and leave me emptied -- and maybe unreplenished. As if love is a commodity weighed and traded, though I know this to be untrue. I know my heart is filled from some great eternal deep and ancient well and what spills out is no loss to me, but flows back down into this common love spring we all share - and that to hold it in means it will turn brackish and dead.

But I know, too, that hearts can be hurt, and when they are they close up. So how do I protect my heart? I do not want spears or arrows, or bombs or guns. And I don't want stone walls piled high enough to block out even the sun. I want none of these instruments of war. I think of how my mother protected me when I was a small child, and I know that I want great soft skirts to hide my face in, arms to hold me tenderly and fiercely, hands that can put on bandages and that know when and how to tear them off.

I think of the women I have surrounded myself with, and how we hold each other sometimes in the dead of night, and I know that I have this strong mother power with me, that I can reach out to it and find strength.

So I will go forward, with one hand reaching out to him, one hand held by these women, and I know I will be safe.