My Paper Heart

I'm not crazy. Or I am, but I would consider it more damaged. I've been bruised and broken, emotionally and physically. The best example I can give is a piece of paper. When you take it out for the first time, when the first person holds it it's clean and pure. Then it goes through the printer, the shredder, gets coffee split on it, your baby brother eats some of it, it gets crumpled and ripped and eventually tossed.
I fell in love for the first time when I was 15. I was fairly innocent and looked at this boy as my future, my forever. I know, I know but I wasn't always as cynical as I appear to be now. It took me years to tell him I loved him, and once I did I couldn't say it enough. But when he broke my heart, less than a year ago, my heart became that paper, and upon picking myself up out of the trash I built a wall that was suppose to protect me from all the bad guys of the world.
Unfortunately, bad guys seemed to be my thing.
And the damage continued, my trust in the male part of our world was nearly nonexistent and I started to believe that, just like Topanga from Boy Meets World, men should live under ground and only be brought out for breeding purposes. Call it daddy issues, and maybe in a few years you will be tucking dollar bills into my thong, but its deeper rooted than that.
When you first fall in love you believe that no one could ever love you the way they did, and you could never love someone more than that person. But your first love is easy. It is easy to love someone who is innocent and pure. Loving someone becomes harder the older you get, the more relationships you have, the longer you have to realize that life really does kick you in the ass. Because then you aren't loving someone who is pure and baggage free, you are falling in love with someone who is damaged or crazy. Who will over react to situations because "it has happened to them before" because it is easier to believe that everyone will hurt you instead of the fact that maybe there are good, nice guys out there. And maybe, just maybe, being the crazy one, the one who stopped believing in the truth, and that someone would actually find them to be enough, wont matter anymore. Because maybe, just maybe, you are falling in love too.
Right? Can we take our paper out of the trash and iron it out, and not only accept the coffee stains and rips but have someone else accept them too, to have someone else love us despite of them. To fall in love despite of the evidence you are damaged, and "crazy".
Is it possible that you fall in love quicker once you know what it feels like? This almost goes along with my last post about how life speeds up the older you get. Can the damage not hold you back but maybe make you fall easier? Faster? Harder? Is it because you know that this is what it feels like? or is it because you know if it falls apart you will be able to rebuild?
Why is it we fall in love quicker the more experienced we become?
Why is it that I have to catch myself before I say "love me!" or before I slip out the phrase "I think love you"?
It's because I'm damaged, because I'm crazy.
I think I may be falling in love with you.
There I wrote it.