Sometimes we put up walls not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to knock them down. - Unknown.

I've borrowed that quote from a friend. She doesn't know where it came from, but it's source is no less than truth. And truth is a powerful reference. 

I find this simple sentence says so much about people, especially me. I've built up wall after wall, cleverly expecting them to be rent apart by those who love me; but they are not. So I have fortress upon fortress built to imprison my own soul. Alone for so long, I've been trapped by my own hand's labor. It's time to tear down those walls. And so I tear at them from the inside, and hope there is someone tearing at them from the other.

I hear the faintest voices of those I might have dreamed into the reality of my mind. I only pray now that they are real, that they are not the figments of my mind I have thought them to be.

Layer by layer I burrow towards what I pray is outside this prison. These phantoms grow louder with ever stone I cast behind me. Are they real? Are they louder as I close in on them, or does my mind make them so in my madness? The prospect caused by my hope is too great now to turn back. I can replace no stone. No walls will be rebuilt. My fortress lay now in ruin; a pile of rubble now marks where I have sought sanctuary for so long. There is no refuge now, only forward. Hope. Fear. I had no hope while in my exile from the world. But, without hope, I also had no fear, no ambition. I had nothing but the knowledge of things I should have been. I had regret, sadness and misery, but no fear- but no hope.

In my madness of isolation these phantoms convinced me to pursue hope; a pursuit of great cost; fear; but the further I pursue hope, the more of it I find; and one grain of hope dissolves fistfuls of fear. And so I go on; with fistfuls of hope.