Have you ever felt so overwhelmed with emotion that you find it almost impossible to speak to anyone about it? But it's not just any emotion, like anger, or delight, or sadness; instead, it's a concoction of fragile sentiments, overlapping each other, interwoven. Lately, I've been feeling this way. Whenever someone asks, "How are you?", I would just smile and lie, "Good." or "Doing just fine." or "I'm hanging in there." The truth is I'm not good, I'm not doing anywhere near fine, and I most certainly am not hanging in there. That's why I've stopped talking about my feelings. But you know what they say, once you stop talking about your feelings, you would stop feeling. Your heart would harden, grow numb even. It would become a void, a hole through which every happy moment or melancholy song falls. In other / less severe-sounding words, you would become less of a human. Well, that doesn't sound much of a comfort either.

Since I'm incapable of talking about my palpitating pot of emotion, I've decided to write about it. 

I guess it all started when I told my boyfriend I wanted a break from him. I told him on the phone (no, not even FaceTime or Skype, because I knew I couldn't bear watching him cry), but the moment I heard him sobbing and blurting out 'but I love you's at the other end of the tenuous line, I knew I would never be able to love the same way again. The pain of breaking someone else's heart is always greater than breaking your own. It was also in that very moment when I began to simultaneously feel every possible emotion. Guilt. Because I made him cry, and I made him think thaat I don't love him anymore. But I do, I still do. Just in a different way now. Relief. Because I finally said what I had been dying to say. The "We need to take a break" phrase had been sitting on the tip of my tongue like a cold slab of marble for months, so imagine the relief of  'losing some weight'. Staccatos of joy. Because I finally mustered the courage to face fear. I was tired of running away, I was sick of being scared. Indescribable agony. Because after I faced my fear, I realized that my boyfriend was my fear. He, once my drug, my soulmate, the only being I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, had become the one I wanted so badly to get rid of. Disgust followed by bursts of rage. Because I was disgusted by and with myself. How could I? How dared I? He gave you all his love and more, and this was what you repaid him with. Followed by bursts of rage. How could I be so selfish? All I ever thought of was what I wanted, but what about what he wanted? I was furious at myself, I wanted to punish myself, but then I realized that this was my punishment, this was the death I had unwittingly sentenced myself to - guilt.

Being able to feel is a privilege, and that's what makes us human; but being able to feel everything simultaneously is torture, and that's also what makes us human.