'The Science of Reasoning'

I spent my life priding myself on always being logical. Making my decisions based on the ‘science of reasoning’ rather than going with just my feelings.

Because there were feelings. So many feelings. The thrill of a touch, the collision of souls, parts of me crashing inside, the parts that I managed to restack, the phantom pain of your palm on my back. But I always thought I had a choice – a choice to stay with my pain, or to put my feelings aside and think logically again. Soon though, that’s all logic really became – a chance to run away. The perfect excuse to shrug off the hurt and paste a smile and hoist myself up high on a self-righteous horse that only ran in circles so I never considered a finish line. We ran circles around reasons not to love, and we found motivation in silence. I can call it always making the ‘right’, decent choices, or quietly and unwittingly conforming. I coated my heart in a thick layer of logic, asking it to pump out facts and not feelings, until it pumped the trust out of me and replaced it with cynicism that always gave me an excuse to be salty. Logic wrapped me up in a bubble of my ignorance, allowing me to run away from everything pure until all I found myself confined my own thoughts. A prisoner with the key to her own lock.

Because if you look hard enough, logic can be found in anything. Families find the logic behind tearing themselves apart over disputes at a holiday dinner. A devoted lover finds the logic behind his unprecedented wandering eye twenty years later. Politicians find the logic behind ripping infants away from a shrieking mother. Our leaders find the logic behind showering bombs on a land not even fertile enough to nourish its own people. We all have reasons behind everything, facts to support them, histories to cite, statistics to taunt but all of our research is based on what was always already there – under the thick sludgy coat of reasoning, over a heart that was pumping out pure feelings but we succumb to being fearful and instead crown ourselves for being ‘oh so logical’. For logic is merely the science of reasoning. The science behind thinking. Human comprehension and the verbalization of an element as pure and irrational as a feeling, is like mixing oil and water, but then wondering why that harsh line in the middle exists. That harsh line is our naivety, our ignorance, for believing that the first step of being sensible is to disregard our senses. There is a perspective that lives within and there are facts that we feed it to grow, but it depends which one you feed. There are no facts within a perception, there is no reasoning behind feelings, there is no objectivity in subjectivity. There is you, crouched inside a bubble of what you call protection or rationality, but is really all your fear embodied. There is you, swallowing your feelings and tightening this bubble, then wondering why it’s so hard to breathe freely. There is you, a vessel of desire and love and excitement and impulsivity but shrouded in anxiety.

There is you, and you owe yourself honesty.