guard your heart?

I had coffee just the other day with a dear friend of mine. I keep her in a special place near my heart. Because she like me, understands what it means to walk around this world with no shell. I feel at times I offer up to complete strangers all I feel on the inside, beating between my two hands. I feel weathered and weary and wonderful because of it. We talk about what it means to let people in like there is a choice. Her sister warned her, advised her, guard your heart, she said, have the hard important conversations, she said. And I asked, aren’t they all hard and important conversations? Haven’t we already established that it’s hard to be a bird? And it is my belief, anyone who thinks they can guard their heart, is grasping only for illusions of control where I can promise, there are none. Isn’t the whole idea of love, to fall? Is that not the point? And if you can succeed in the guarding part, have you really succeed at all? To keep out the very person who are you supposed to let in. Not in my world. Not in my beating bloody body, not mine.