Fear breaks hearts, not people. Demons we have never learned to deal with…

“You need to reduce your energy and your guard.” – she said dead cold, as she wanted to let me know that she would be the boss in this relationship. I looked at her like I really didn’t see her and just smiled.

I have always been fascinated by precarious women, those who need to extinguish someone else’s fervor just to elevate themselves. The ones who do not understand that we shine the most when we reach out to others and help them climb the stairs.

She was not my company. We were not the same world. And it wasn’t because the lioness in me was too fond of attention, it was because the human in me couldn’t be friends with someone who was too fond of extinguishing other people’s stars.

I saw it every step of the way. Women who walk over others. Women who break everyone around to rise.

Women who look flawless until they speak. Women from which scream frustration and insecurity. Women who want to jump out of their skin when they are near women like me.

Those who always laugh and see a world full of magic, those who recognize someone else’s worth and want to celebrate it. Those who open their eyes and arms and heart and wish to hug each child and every person and every new day.

I am rejected by narrow-mindedness, possessive and closed skies, below which you cannot climb on your toes while protecting your eyes from the sun and discovering new horizons. It refuses to be near those who scream with who scream uncertainty, needs and compulsion because I feel like they just want to feed themselves on someone else’s love and energy and then reject them.

It refuses me when others take my shoulders and try to restrain life in me, to sit me like a child in a chair and forbid me to breathe, think and feel, just to calm the demons in their bowels.

It repels me when people do not see the stars in someone else’s eyes, just as she does not see them in anyone around her.

I have often thought that I must do it myself, raise a guard against such women and protect my inner world. For a long time, I stood beside them expressionlessly as if we were about to play a poker game. But somehow, somewhere along the way, I realized that what I really am, that my cheerfulness, enthusiasm and open heart, most protect me from human malice.

I don’t have to become like them to protect myself. I don’t really have to protect myself at all. Their insecurity and frustration can’t touch me.

“The barking dog doesn’t bite,” –  said one of my best friends a long time ago. – “That’s how I know you do not think what you write, but you are just raising your walls. So raise them if you think you need to.”

I do not need to build walls. Along the way, I realized I didn’t need to rise them.

I do not have to protect myself from those I love, or those who do not know how to deal with me, because other people’s feelings created by crazy scenarios in their minds are not my responsibility.

With me, everyone knows what it is. Everyone is great with me, until they crash themselves in my eyes. With me everyone is safe until they start treating people like sheep, playing the angry wolf.

Everyone is a human to me until they try to turn themselves into an un-human. Then I just turn on my heel and forget it exists. Not out of malice, but because I don’t need to be a pillow for someone else’s darkness, or a mat for someone else’s frustration.

She breathed them, as she looked at me with those piercing gray eyes, repeating that wicked sentence, carefully emphasizing every word, to give the little girl in me a lesson, to disarm, tame and frighten her from the beginning.

But I am no longer a girl, I just have a child’s heart and have long not been afraid of wolves. I know where their pain points are and where they are vulnerable, just where the fangs come out, just like her, at that point. Her strength was artificially created on the ruins of someone else’s. She fed herself by extinguishing other people’s stars and turning them into lumps of dust, aimlessly wandering the universe.

But her darkness was too weak in my case. I kissed her cheek, wished her all the best, and slowly, stepping safely out of her dark life, never looking back.

No regrets, because I really had nothing to regret about.

I thanked her for the great lesson and the opportunity to take another look at the horizons of her starless sky and see how it is certainly not the path that I’d ever be able to walk.

Not every opportunity is really an opportunity, not everyone who offers you a hand is your friend.

Not every wolf is actually a wolf, but a small, wounded sheep who does not understand that people are not approaching to tear them away, but to learn something from them, share something with them, or just have a cup of coffee.

We are not all bad. We don’t all have evil intentions. And we don’t come into the lives of others to make a mess there. Sometimes we come because life’s threads are so intertwined, because each of us needed some lessons and some experience to know for ourselves which way to proceed.

But I see every day in human eyes all the power of fear, which does not give them, to be what they are, which hinders them in love, dreams and desires, which does not allow them to open their hearts and laugh honestly with another human being.

I see your fears breaking your hearts. I see souls drowning, I see them extinguish relationships and how they separate man from man. And I don’t mean to feed those fears. I do not mean to flatter ‘wolves’.