Dear commitment-phobe,

1. Your heart, it is intimidated by the idea of love – but did you even know that your skin absorbs strength out of the cicatrices that are strewn across it?

2. Maybe sometimes it is okay to risk it all for the little things – the 3 am's spent in his embrace, the goodbyes that extend into hourlong conversations and the kisses on your body that planted their roots in your paling skin.

3. I hope you're not startled, when ghosts of unborn relationships that you forsake form clouds right in front of your feet, urging you to step on with as much recklessness as you can carry in your bony arms – arms that wrap themselves around your frosted spine, aching for the comfort of a warm body cupped against your numbing palms, elbows, knees, toes, belly.

4. Just for the record, when you walk the tightrope every night, just a few blocks away is a heart that beats in unison with the tempo of your tiptoes.

5. You like to think you're a silent gladiator – removed from the eyes of the world in the wars you wage on your own demons. I think you fail, dear commitment-phobe, to feel the set of eyes that fixate on a point right in between your spine and neck, eyes that perforate the cracks in your armor - or are they peepholes?

6. Do you have the slightest idea how many times you have been remembered on drunken moonlit nights, your words enveloped in the warmth of threadbare hardbacks preserved inside the rickety nightstands of his mind's attic?

7. Remember, dear commitment-phobe, that this is not a memo of things that people will ask of you. Rather, it is the anthology of the final lines of every book your trembling fingertips started but dared not complete.

8. Somewhere in his favorite coffee house, your scent still lingers; it lingers, and it rides the wisps of cigarette smoke like waves determined to go just a little farther before they fall in on themselves.

Dear commitment-phobe, a word of advice? Commit to the love that you chose to stand by and observe from a few feet away, like a tourist out in the streets of New York. Soon, you will realize that it is worth your itinerant heart's ache.