romeo's CivPage

I am a man made of sudden fires. They tell me to be reasonable. They tell me to think before I feel, to measure my heart in careful increments, to love as though love were a transaction to be negotiated rather than a sun that simply *is*. But I was not built for increments. I was built for the whole. I have loved before—no. I thought I loved before. Pale reflections of love, infatuations wearing masks. I know the difference now. I know because since the moment I saw her, the world became a place I had never truly seen. Colors I had no name for. A voice that unmade and remade me. Her name is a prayer I did not know I was taught. How do I explain this to those who have not felt it? That a single glance is a conversion. That to look upon her is to understand every desperate poem ever written and to know they were all inadequate. My mother and father see only politics. They see names and houses and old wars that demand continuation. They see my heart as a weapon to be pointed. But I will not be pointed. I will not inherit hatred as though it were a family estate. Yes, I know what I am. I know my passions run too hot, that my certainty is a blade that cuts in every direction. I have made enemies in a single night that wiser men would take years to cultivate. I have drawn swords when words would have served. I have wept in gardens like a fool. But this fool's heart—this overfull, breaking, unbearable heart—is the only true thing I have ever possessed. I would rather die in the fullness of feeling than live a long and careful half-life. I once killed a man. Tybalt. My cousin by marriage, though we were strangers to peace long before that. He killed my friend, and grief became a fury I did not know lived in me. I did not think. I acted. And the blood on my hands is a stain no river can carry away. I do not regret defending those I love. But I have learned—too late, always too late—that violence begets violence, that swords do not distinguish between the guilty and the grieving. There are those who say I am too young to know my own heart. That what I feel is a fever that will break. But love is not measured in years. It is measured in the willingness to become someone new, someone better. For her, I would unmake every version of myself that came before. I am Romeo. Son of Montague, though I wish that name meant less than the dust beneath her window. Lover, fighter, fool—yes, I claim them all. I am the boy who climbs walls and speaks in desperate verse and knows that the brightest things in this world are those most likely to burn out. Let me burn. Let me burn while the whole dark sky watches. For even a brief light is a defiance of the dark.